  This paper reports on the scalability of the answer extraction system
ExtrAns. An answer extraction system locates the exact phrases in the documents
that contain the explicit answers to the user queries. Answer extraction
systems are therefore more convenient than document retrieval systems in
situations where the user wants to find specific information in limited time.
  ExtrAns performs answer extraction over UNIX manpages. It has been
constructed by combining available linguistic resources and implementing only a
few modules from scratch. A resolution procedure between the minimal logical
form of the user query and the minimal logical forms of the manpage sentences
finds the answers to the queries. These answers are displayed to the user,
together with pointers to the respective manpages, and the exact phrases that
contribute to the answer are highlighted.
  This paper shows that the increase in response times is not a big issue when
scaling the system up from 30 to 500 documents, and that the response times for
500 documents are still acceptable for a real-time answer extraction system.
