Which course? Discourse! Teaching Discourse and Generation in the Era of LLMs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new interdisciplinary undergraduate course on discourse processing and natural language generation, emphasizing integration of theory and empirical methods to prepare students for evolving NLP landscapes.

Contribution

It presents the design, implementation, and initial insights of a novel course bridging linguistics and computer science in discourse and NLG.

Findings

Positive student feedback and engagement

Successful integration of theoretical and empirical content

Foundation for future curriculum development

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.