17. The computer-readable medium as recited in claim 15 , wherein the entity is a semi-structured named entity.
15. A computer-readable medium storing thereon computer-readable instructions, comprising: instructions for obtaining a set of candidates and corresponding contexts, each of the set of candidates being a potential seed example of an entity and each of the corresponding contexts including one or more seed terms; instructions for obtaining a set of seed examples of the entity and corresponding contexts, wherein each of the set of seed examples includes an expression and each of the corresponding contexts includes one or more seed terms; instructions for comparing the expressions of the set of seed examples with the set of candidates to find a positive set of candidates that each match at least one of the expressions; instructions for comparing the contexts of the positive set of candidates with contexts of the set of seed examples of the entity to determine a similarity score associated with each of the set of candidates; instructions for ranking the set of candidates according to the corresponding similarity scores; instructions for selecting a subset of the set of candidates according to the ranking; instructions for adding at least one of the selected subset of the set of candidates to the set of seed examples, wherein adding includes converting each of the selected subset of the set of candidates to an expression; instructions for creating a set of rules from the set of seed examples resulting from the adding step; and instructions for generating a final set of seed examples of the entity by executing the set of rules against the set of candidates, wherein each seed example in the final set of seed examples includes an expression.