A text span forming either a single word or a series of two or more words that a user intended to select is predicted. A document and a location pointer that indicates a particular location in the document are received and input to different candidate text span generation methods. A ranked list of one or more scored candidate text spans is received from each of the different candidate text span generation methods. A machine-learned ensemble model is used to re-score each of the scored candidate text spans that is received from each of the different candidate text span generation methods. The ensemble model is trained using a machine learning method and features from a dataset of true intended user text span selections. A ranked list of re-scored candidate text spans is received from the ensemble model.