AbstractLIANA is a question answering system in PL/1. The program takes German natural language input and, by morphological, syntactic and semantic analysis, creates a representation of the text, which is stored and can be accessed for retrieval purposes.All individuals (objects) mentioned in the sentence are found and stored. In continuous text, therefore, information about individuals can be piled up successively.LIANA uses the programming concept of the Boston Syntax Analyzer. Therefore, the output of syntactic analysis is a tree structure, simulated through pointers which connect the nodes in the tree. Each node is associated with a feature table which is operated on by the semantic interpretation. Node and feature handling is facilitated by a set of macros for adding, erasing, and checking features and copying, deleting, and inserting nodes.