1. A document retrieval method that retrieves documents from a database, the database comprising internal representations of documents wherein the internal representations include syntactic relations between terms of sentences of the documents and a semantic lattice for the terms of the documents in the database, the semantic lattice specifying the semantic relations between the terms, the method comprising the steps of: a) receiving a database query, b) extracting syntactic relations between terms of the query, c) creating an internal representation of the query based on the terms of the query and the extracted syntactic relations between the terms of the query, d) appending new terms to the semantic lattice if the query includes terms not included in the semantic lattice in the database, e) projecting the query onto each of the documents in the database by comparing the internal representation and terms of the query to the internal representation and terms of the documents using the semantic lattice for comparing the terms and computing a similarity between the query and the documents in the database, f) ranking the documents in the database according to the computed similarities, and g) outputting documents as retrieved documents according to the rank order.