A method is disclosed for searching for text passages in text documents. The method uses computerized prediction-based and ontology-based semantic language processing. Both the text passages that are to be located, as well as the text of the documents that are searched, are transformed on the basis of surface-syntactic and deep-syntactic information to generate a semantic network structure. The semantic network structure is linguistically processed based on information about other parts of the semantic network structure in order to improve the accuracy of the semantic network structure. Nodes in the semantic network structure are classified by linking the nodes in the semantic network structure to nodes in a pre-existing ontological network structure representing concepts in a language.