  Detecting semantic arguments of a predicate word has been conventionally
modeled as a sentence-level task. The typical reader, however, perfectly
interprets predicate-argument relations in a much wider context than just the
sentence where the predicate was evoked. In this work, we reformulate the
problem of argument detection through textual entailment to capture semantic
relations across sentence boundaries. We propose a method that tests whether
some semantic relation can be inferred from a full passage by first encoding it
into a simple and standalone proposition and then testing for entailment
against the passage. Our method does not require direct supervision, which is
generally absent due to dataset scarcity, but instead builds on existing NLI
and sentence-level SRL resources. Such a method can potentially explicate
pragmatically understood relations into a set of explicit sentences. We
demonstrate it on a recent document-level benchmark, outperforming some
supervised methods and contemporary language models.
