Abstract: A mechanism is provided in a data processing system for using paraphrase metrics for answering questions. The mechanism receives an input question and generating a candidate answer from a corpus of information. The candidate answer has a supporting passage from the corpus of information. The mechanism divides the input question into a first sequence of tokens and divides the supporting passage into a second sequence of tokens. The mechanism identifies a plurality of subsequences of tokens within the second sequence of tokens and applies a paraphrase metric to compare the first sequence of tokens to each of the plurality of subsequences of tokens to generate a plurality of paraphrase metric scores. The mechanism then determines a confidence score for the candidate answer based on a highest paraphrase metric score within the plurality of paraphrase metric scores.