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.
Guardians of Discourse: Evaluating LLMs on Multilingual Offensive Language Detection
School of AI and Advanced Computing, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学人工智能与先进计算学院）；School of Advanced Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学先进技术学院）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学澳大利亚人工智能研究所）
CoUDA: Coherence Evaluation via Unified Data Augmentation
Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Soochow University（苏州大学人工智能研究院）；School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院）；Jiangsu Normal University（江苏师范大学）
Evaluation and Facilitation of Online Discussions in the LLM Era: A Survey
Archimedes, Athena Research Center（阿希米德研究中心）；Athens University of Economics and Business（雅典经济与商业大学）；École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷高等师范学校）；INSEAD
EssayJudge: A Multi-Granular Benchmark for Assessing Automated Essay Scoring Capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Beijing Future Brain Education Technology Co., Ltd.（北京未来脑教育科技有限公司）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Big Data Research Institute（广西壮族自治区大数据研究院）
