The present teaching relates to method and system for assessing semantic distance. A query is received and processed, by a document representation constructor, to obtain a first query representation. The query is then processed by a query representation constructor to obtain a second query representation. Based on the first and second query representations, a dynamic norm is determined. Based on the second query representation, a plurality of documents are identified as being related to the query and a semantic distance between the query and the plurality of documents is determined based on the dynamic norm.