Techniques for dynamically highlighting text in electronic documents are provided. In a first set of embodiments, a computing device can, upon presenting an electronic document to a user, receive a user selection of an entity associated with the document. The entity can represent a category of terms deemed relevant to the electronic document, where a term is a word or a combination of word(s) and/or punctuation(s) that have semantic significance. In response, the computing device can automatically highlight terms in the presented document that belong to the selected entity. In a second set of embodiments, the computing device can, upon presenting the electronic document to the user, receive a user selection of a word in the document. In response, the computing device can automatically highlight terms in the presented document that include the selected word, as well as other terms that are related to those terms.