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📖 Glossary: the working vocabulary

Status: reference. Written 2026-09-02.

Written for you, the person writing a draft with this pipeline. Every term below appears throughout the documentation; each entry says what the thing is to you, and names the one document that owns the detail. Terms are grouped by when you first meet them, not alphabetically -- read top to bottom once and the rest of the documentation gets easier.

📚 Your library, inside the pipeline

  • Citekey -- the identifier your reference manager assigns each entry (kritzinger_digital_2018), which a draft cites as [@kritzinger_digital_2018]. The one hard rule of this project: a citekey may be used only if it came from your own .bib export and a real PDF was really parsed (SOUL.md).
  • Corpus -- your papers as the pipeline sees them: the .bib export plus the attached PDFs, synced into the ledger.
  • Ledger -- the small database (content/ledger.sqlite) recording every entry: its citekey, title, whether its PDF parsed, and where the extracted text lives. Built and updated by chitragupta corpus sync; inspected with chitragupta corpus ledger (ZOTERO.md gets you here).
  • Sync -- the deterministic run that reads your .bib, updates the ledger, and extracts each PDF's text. No AI is involved: same bibliography in, same citekeys out.
  • Parse -- turning one PDF into plain text the pipeline can search and quote. Which of the two parser backends to use is PDF-PARSER.md's question.

✍ Writing

  • Genre skill -- one of the nine writing behaviours (survey, thesis chapter, textbook chapter, tutorial, deep research, three revisers, and the book assembler). You never invoke one by name; you ask in ordinary words and the right one answers (GENRE.md).
  • Draft -- the document being written, under content/drafts/.
  • Dossier -- the folder written alongside a draft holding the judgment that produced it: the scope, who the reader is, which sources were kept and which were turned down, and a revision log. It is why a draft can be changed months later without re-running anything (DOSSIER.md; the walkthrough is WRITING-PROCESS.md).
  • The gate -- chitragupta draft gate, the single check standing between a draft and a rendered document: is every citekey in this draft really in the ledger? It is the only blocking check in the pipeline, and a failure sends the draft back to be rewritten -- you normally never see one.
  • Render -- turning a finished draft into PDF/LaTeX/Word with its bibliography resolved.

🔭 Exploring

  • Topic -- a group of papers about the same thing. Two kinds exist side by side: seed topics are phrases you wrote (content/seed_topics.toml), matched against your papers; emergent topics are groupings the corpus itself turned out to have, discovered by clustering (TOPIC-MODELLING.md).
  • Topic graph -- how the topics relate to each other: by sharing papers, and by being about similar things. chitragupta corpus discover is how you walk it (TOPIC-DISCOVERY.md).
  • Overview -- the Markdown file corpus discover --out writes for one topic: its papers with references, its neighbours, and real sentences quoted verbatim from the papers -- raw material for a new draft, never a generated summary.

🔍 Checking

  • Review aid -- one of the ten read-only reports you can run over a finished draft (provenance, verbatim overlap, coverage, and so on). Every aid is advisory: it reports for you to judge and never blocks anything (REVIEW.md).
  • Provenance -- the aid answering "does the cited paper actually say this?", worst matches first (CITATION-PROVENANCE.md).
  • Verbatim scan -- the aid answering "how much of this wording came from my sources?" (PLAGIARISM.md).

⚙ How the machinery talks about itself

Five structural words the other documents lean on. You can write a whole book without needing them; they matter when you read the deeper pages.

  • Layer -- one of the four groups of commands: corpus (deterministic), drafting (generative, reviewed by you), enrichment (optional depth), review (advisory reports). FEATURES.md draws them.
  • Stage -- one step of the enrichment layer (docling, embed, bertopic, extract-keywords, seed-topics, converge, topic-graph), each reporting its own honest status -- ok, partial, skipped or error. LADDERS.md states which of the four changes the run's exit code.
  • Artefact -- a file a stage or a sync writes under content/, which later commands read. The layers never call each other; they leave files for each other, which is why you can run any piece alone.
  • Ladder and tier -- the two ways the pipeline handles having more than one way to do a job. A ladder falls back automatically and tells you which rung it landed on; a tier is a menu you chose from, and stops rather than substituting when your choice is unavailable (LADDERS.md).
  • Enrichment / the enrich extra -- the optional heavy machinery (layout-aware parsing, semantic search, topic modelling), installed with pip install 'chitragupta-cli[enrich]'. Nothing else needs it, and everything that can use it says so when it is absent rather than failing.