\chapter{Introduction}
\label{ch:introduction}

Open with the problem and with the reason it matters outside your own office.
Long technical documents are written by small teams over several years, and the
parts drift apart: a symbol changes meaning between chapters, a figure is
updated in one place and not in another, a number in the summary no longer
matches the table it came from. Teams catch most of this by reading everything
again before every deadline, which is slow and which they stop doing when the
deadline is close.

\section{Motivation}

The manual check is expensive because it does not scale with the document. A
reviewer who knows the material can read about twenty pages an hour, so a two
hundred page draft costs a full working day of a senior person, and it costs
that again after every round of edits. Teams therefore check late, check
partially, or check only the parts that changed, and the errors that survive
are the ones that span chapters.

\section{Aims and objectives}

This thesis asks whether the consistency of a long document can be checked
mechanically, from the source, without asking the authors to write in a
restricted language. Three objectives follow from that question.

\begin{enumerate}
  \item Describe what practitioners check today and what those checks cost,
        using interviews with people who write documents of this size.
  \item Build a method that recovers the relationships between symbols,
        figures and numbers from the source of the document itself.
  \item Evaluate the method against drafts with known errors and report where
        it fails as well as where it works.
\end{enumerate}

\section{Contributions}

The work contributes an account of current practice drawn from interviews, a
method that turns the source of a document into a graph of its internal
references, and an evaluation on drafts with seeded errors. The limits are
stated in Chapter~\ref{ch:conclusion}: the method reads structure, not meaning,
and it cannot tell a deliberate change from an accidental one.

\section{Structure of the thesis}

Chapter~\ref{ch:background} reviews the relevant literature and describes the
workflow and the datasets the later chapters use.
Chapter~\ref{ch:conclusion} summarizes the contributions, states the
limitations and lists the work that follows from them.
Appendix~\ref{ch:questions} holds the interview questions.
