12. The method of claim 8 , wherein said generating comprises generating a query context similarity score Score qcsim for the individual candidate strings by: receiving context information for the entity reference string r e , the context information for the entity reference string r e identifying words used in conjunction with the entity reference string r e when the entity reference string r e has been submitted as the query; receiving context information for the individual candidate strings, the context information for the individual candidate strings identifying words used in conjunction with the individual candidate strings when the individual candidate strings have been submitted as other queries; and generating the query context similarity score Score qcsim for the individual candidate strings using the context information for the entity reference string r e and the context information for the individual candidate strings.
8. The method of claim 1 , further comprising generating the set of candidate strings S e by: determining, using the query log data, a set of documents D that have been selected in response to submitting the entity reference string r e as a query; and determining, using the query log data, a set of queries that have been submitted and which have resulted in selection of at least one document in the set of documents D, the set of queries comprising the set of candidate strings S e .