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.

翻译：自然语言处理领域在过去几年经历了广泛而持续的变革，引发了超越学科边界的讨论。这为教育领域提出了重要问题：在不断变化的研究图景中，我们应如何设计能够连接不同子学科的课程？本文从话语处理的角度探讨这一问题——该领域对语言的有意性、注意性及连贯性结构具有丰富的语言学见解和计算模型。话语分析与开放式或长文本生成高度相关，然而现有本科课程体系对这一关联性的探讨尚不充分。我们提出了一门新课程“计算话语分析与自然语言生成”。该课程由具有互补专业背景的团队合作设计，于2025年秋季首次作为语言学与计算机科学交叉认证的高年级本科课程开设。我们的教学理念是深度融合理论与实证研究，在课堂内外及作业设计中培养探索性思维。本文详细阐述了课程架构，并通过独立问卷调查的启示及对未来发展方向的展望作结。