Abstract: A system, method and computer program product for conducting questions and answers with deferred type evaluation based on any corpus of data. The method includes processing a query including waiting until a “Type” (i.e. a descriptor) is determined AND a candidate answer is provided; the Type is not required as part of a predetermined ontology but is only a lexical/grammatical item. Then, a search is conducted to look (search) for evidence that the candidate answer has the required LAT (e.g., as determined by a matching function that can leverage a parser, a semantic interpreter and/or a simple pattern matcher). In another embodiment, it may be attempted to match the LAT to a known Ontological Type and then look for a candidate answer up in an appropriate knowledge-base, database, and the like determined by that type. Then, all the evidence from all the different ways to determine that the candidate answer has the expected lexical answer type (LAT) is combined and one or more answers are delivered to a user.