Trouble with checking and condensing lists of conditions in strings

I've been making a sort of artificial intelligence (it's more like a long list of question - answer situations) and I've been looking to step up the complexity, but I know there's a way to shorten the amount of typing I have to do and I can't quite find it. Anyways, here's the long version of me asking for input, then checking the type of input (for example it's a question):

a = input()
if "what" in a:
    a_type = question
if "where" in a:
    a_type = question
if "when" in a:
    a_type = question
if "why" in a:
    a_type = question
if "who" in a:
    a_type = question

and so on, then I would check for subject, mood, expression, etc... If anybody knows how to condense all 5 of those statements that'd be great, thanks...