A distributional similarity between a word of a search query and a term of a candidate word sequences is used to determine an error model probability that describes the probability of the search query given the candidate word sequence. The error model probability is used to determine a probability of the candidate word sequence given the search query. The probability of the candidate word sequence given the search query is used to select a candidate word sequence as a corrected word sequence for the search query. Distributional similarity is also used to build features that are applied in maximum entropy model to compute the probability of the candidate word sequence given the search query.