Large Language Models (LLMs) changed the way we design and interact with software systems. Their ability to process and extract information from text has drastically improved productivity in a number of routine tasks. Developers that want to include these models in their software stack, however, face a dreadful challenge: debugging LLMs’ inconsistent behavior across minor variations of the prompt. We therefore introduce two metrics for classification tasks, namely *sensitivity* and *consistency*, which are complementary to task performance. First, sensitivity measures changes of predictions across rephrasings of the prompt, and does not require access to ground truth labels. Instead, consistency measures how predictions vary across rephrasings for elements of the same class. We perform an empirical comparison of these metrics on text classification tasks, using them as guideline for understanding failure modes of the LLM. Our hope is that sensitivity and consistency will be helpful to guide prompt engineering and obtain LLMs that balance robustness with performance.

In this paper we present ThReeNN, a model for Community Question Answering, Task 3, of SemEval-2017. The proposed model exploits both syntactic and semantic information to build a single and meaningful embedding space. Using a dependency parser in combination with word embeddings, the model creates sequences of inputs for a Recurrent Neural Network, which are then used for the ranking purposes of the Task. The score obtained on the official test data shows promising results.