Syntactic information potentially plays a much more important role in question answering than it does in information retrieval. Although many people have used syntactic evidence in Question Answering, there haven’t been many detailed experiments reported in the literature. The aim of the experiment described in this paper is to study the impact of a particular approach for using syntactic information on question answering effectiveness. Our results indicate that a combination of syntactic information with heuristics for ranking potential answers can perform better than the ranking heuristics on their own. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval General Terms Algorithm, Experimentation KEYWORDS Syntactic information, question answering