Salience is a metric returned by NLP APIs during entity extraction, indicating the importance or prominence of an entity within the context of the document being analyzed. It is expressed as a score alongside the entity name and type.

In entity-based search intent classification, the salience score is used as a weighted signal: more prominent entities (those with higher salience) are given greater influence on the final intent classification decision. Salience data is also key for entity-driven content analysis, where an entity appearing above a certain salience threshold can be highlighted as the prominent entity for an article.