1. A method for proofreading a document in electronic form using a computer system, which comprises the steps of: identifying attributes of the document by parsing the document using a parsing rules database of the computer system; interpreting the identified attributes of the document using an interpretation rules database of the computer system to identify elements of the document, wherein the interpretation rules database includes domain-independent and domain-specific rules; creating known element objects in the computer system using the identified elements; linking related ones of the known element objects using a linkage rules database of the computer system; and comparing the known element objects and linked objects using a proofreading rules database of the computer system to identify semantic inconsistencies in the document.