13. The system according to claim 11 , wherein: provided that two candidate named entities M 1 and M 2 are two random variables, the pointwise mutual information of M 1 and M 2 is defined by: PMI ⁡ ( M 1 , M 2 ) = log 2 ⁡ ( P ⁡ ( M 1 ⋂ M 2 ) P ⁡ ( M 1 ) * P ⁡ ( M 2 ) ) = log 2 ⁡ ( C ⁡ ( M 1 ⋂ M 2 ) N C ⁡ ( M 1 ) N * C ⁡ ( M 2 ) N ) wherein P(M 1 ∩M 2 ) is a probability that M 1 and M 2 co-occur; and P(M 1 )*P(M 2 ) is a probability that M 1 and M 2 co-occur when M 1 and M 2 are statistically independent.
11. The system according to claim 8 , wherein: based on the predicted user intent, at least one search result is presented to the user.