This paper describes the Ephyra question answering engine, a modular and extensible framework that allows to integrate multiple approaches to question answering in one system. Our framework can be adapted to languages other than English by replacing language-specific components. It supports the two major approaches to question answering, knowledge annotation and knowledge mining. Ephyra uses the web as a data resource, but could also work with smaller corpora. In addition, we propose a novel approach to question interpretation which abstracts from the original formulation of the question. Text patterns are used to interpret a question and to extract answers from text snippets. Our system automatically learns the patterns for answer extraction, using question-answer pairs as training data. Experimental results revealed the potential of this approach.