An approach is provided that receives a question at a question-answering (QA) system. A number of passages are identified that are relevant to the received question. A question knowledge graph is generated that corresponds to the question and a set of passage knowledge graphs are also generated with each passage knowledge graph corresponding to one of the identified passages. Each of the passage knowledge graphs are compared to the question knowledge graph with the comparison resulting in a set of knowledge graph candidate answers (kgCAs). A set of candidate answers (CAs) is computed by the QA with at least one of the CAs being based on one of the kgCAs.