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Searching for precise answers to questions, also called “question-answering”, is an evolution of information retrieval systems: can it, as its predecessors, rely mostly on numeric methods, using exceedingly little linguistic knowledge? After a presentation of the question-answering task and the issues it raises, we examine to which extent it can be performed with very little linguistic knowledge. We then review the different kinds of linguistic knowledge that researchers have been using in their systems: syntactic and semantic knowledge for sentence analysis, role of “named entity” recognition, taking into account of the textual dimension of documents. A discussion on the respective contributions of linguistic and non-linguistic methods concludes the paper.