  In this paper we describe ExtrAns, an answer extraction system. Answer
extraction (AE) aims at retrieving those exact passages of a document that
directly answer a given user question. AE is more ambitious than information
retrieval and information extraction in that the retrieval results are phrases,
not entire documents, and in that the queries may be arbitrarily specific. It
is less ambitious than full-fledged question answering in that the answers are
not generated from a knowledge base but looked up in the text of documents. The
current version of ExtrAns is able to parse unedited Unix "man pages", and
derive the logical form of their sentences. User queries are also translated
into logical forms. A theorem prover then retrieves the relevant phrases, which
are presented through selective highlighting in their context.
