Abstract
The field of NLP has undergone vast, continuous transformations over the past few years, sparking debates going beyond discipline boundaries. This begs important questions in education: how do we design courses that bridge sub-disciplines in this shifting landscape? This paper explores this question from the angle of discourse processing, an area with rich linguistic insights and computational models for the intentional, attentional, and coherence structure of language. Discourse is highly relevant for open-ended or long-form text generation, yet this connection is under-explored in existing undergraduate curricula. We present a new course, "Computational Discourse and Natural Language Generation". The course is collaboratively designed by a team with complementary expertise and was offered for the first time in Fall 2025 as an upper-level undergraduate course, cross-listed between Linguistics and Computer Science. Our philosophy is to deeply integrate the theoretical and empirical aspects, and create an exploratory mindset inside the classroom and in the assignments. This paper describes the course in detail and concludes with takeaways from an independent survey as well as our vision for future directions.
Abstract (translated)
近年来，自然语言处理（NLP）领域经历了巨大的持续变革，引发了超越学科界限的辩论。这引发了一些关于教育的重要问题：我们如何设计课程来连接这一不断变化景观中的各个子学科？本文从话语处理的角度探讨了这个问题，该领域具有丰富的语言学见解和计算模型，涵盖语言的目的性、注意力结构和连贯性结构。话语在开放式的或长篇文本生成中极为相关，但这种关联在现有的本科课程体系中却鲜有探索。我们提出了一门新的课程：“计算话语与自然语言生成”。这门课程由一个拥有互补专业知识的团队共同设计，并于2025年秋季首次作为高级本科生课程推出，在语言学和计算机科学之间交叉开设。我们的理念是将理论与实证方面深度融合，并在课堂内以及作业中培养一种探索性的思维模式。本文详细描述了该课程的内容，并通过独立调查的结果总结出一些观点，同时展望未来的发展方向。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02878
