Patent Document ID: 9047278
Application ID: 13673015

Base Claim:
1. A method performed by data processing apparatus, the method comprising: identifying queries in query data; determining, in each of the queries, (i) an entity-descriptive portion that refers to an entity and (ii) a suffix; determining query counts of a number of times that the respective queries were submitted; for at least a particular query of the identified queries, distributing the query count for the particular query among multiple different entities by assigning, to each of the multiple different entities, a partial query count that is an estimate of a number of submissions of the particular query that refer to the entity; estimating, based at least in part on one or more of the partial query counts, an entity-level count of query submissions that include a particular suffix and are considered to refer to a first entity of the multiple different entities; determining that the first entity is a particular type of entity; determining a type-level count of the query submissions that include the particular suffix and are estimated to refer to entities of the particular type of entity; and assigning, based on the entity-level count and the type-level count, a score for the particular suffix with respect to the first entity.

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Claim 13:
13. The method of claim 1 , further comprising: determining that, in addition to being the particular type of entity, the first entity is also a second type of entity; and determining a second type-level count of the query submissions that include the particular suffix and are estimated to refer to entities of the second type of entity; and wherein assigning the score for the particular suffix with respect to the first entity comprises assigning the score for the particular suffix with respect to the first entity based on the entity-level count, the type-level count for the particular type, and the second type-level count.