We describe the implementation of a short answer extraction system. It consists of a simple sentence selection front-end and a two phase approach to answer extraction from a sentence. In the first phase sentence classification is performed with a classifier trained with the passive aggressive algorithm utilizing the UIUC dataset and taxonomy and a feature set including word vectors. This phase outperforms the current best published results on that dataset. In the second phase, a sieve algorithm consisting of a series of increasingly general extraction rules is applied, using WordNet to find word types aligned with the UIUC classifications determined in the first phase. Some very preliminary performance metrics are presented.