a method and apparatus are presented for using directed reasoning to provide natural language responses to questions and commands in natural language . the directed reasoning process uses concepts in the natural language sentence to identify relevant response concepts in a knowledge base , by creating a continuous chain of logic from the input concept to the response concept and limiting the creation of the logic chains to only those consistent with the context of the natural language sentence and information in the knowledge base . the invention allows the identification of relevant concepts that elude traditional concept searching based on pattern matching , while focusing computational resources on only those logic calculations relevant to the natural language sentence and knowledge base . the invention will automatically identify the relevant source documents to use and create a knowledge base during run time , without requiring preprogrammed ontologies or knowledge bases .