\chapter{Conclusion}
\label{ch:conclusion}

\section{Summary of contributions}

This thesis set out to check the internal consistency of a long document
mechanically, without restricting how its authors write. It reported what
practitioners check today and what those checks cost, described a method that
recovers the relationships inside a document from its source, and evaluated
that method on a held-out set of drafts with seeded errors.

\section{Limitations}

The method reads structure and not meaning. It reports that a symbol is used
with two definitions, not which of the two is correct, and a reader still has
to decide. It also assumes that the source is available and reasonably regular,
which rules out documents assembled from generated fragments. The evaluation
uses seeded errors, and a seeded error is easier to find than an error a tired
author made at midnight.

\section{Future work}

Three directions follow. The first is to run the method on a live project over
a full writing cycle rather than on finished drafts, which would show whether
the reports are read when they arrive. The second is to rank reports by the
cost of the error rather than by confidence, since a wrong number in a summary
matters more than an inconsistent symbol in an appendix. The third is to make
the queries editable by the people who write the documents, so that a team can
add the checks its own field cares about.
