Prompt Engineering 101 Prompt Engineering Guidelines from a Linguistic Perspective
Han Wenjuan, Wei Xiang, Cui Xingyu, Cheng Ning, Jiang Guangyuan, Qian Weinan, Zhang Chi
Abstract
“Deploying tuning-free prompting is challenging in engineering practice: it not only requiresusers to engage in cumbersome trials and errors but is also extremely time-consuming,as even a slight change in wording and phrasing could have a huge impact on the finalperformance. To further investigate the impact of different prompts, in this work, weperform a systematic inspection of four factors in linguistics involved in prompt engineering:syntax, semantics, lexicon, and pragmatics. The empirical results quantify the sensitivityof the output to small textual perturbations in four linguistic factors of prompts. Basedon the analysis of these four factors, we present a series of design guidelines to helphuman users write effective prompts. Human evaluation on amateurs shows that usingthe proposed guidelines helps humans produce prompts with significant gains in zero-shotperformance in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) and hence validates the utility ofthe guidelines.”- Anthology ID:
- 2024.ccl-1.108
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 23rd Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Main Conference)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Taiyuan, China
- Editors:
- Maosong Sun, Jiye Liang, Xianpei Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Yulan He
- Venue:
- CCL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Chinese Information Processing Society of China
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1408–1426
- Language:
- English
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.ccl-1.108/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Han Wenjuan, Wei Xiang, Cui Xingyu, Cheng Ning, Jiang Guangyuan, Qian Weinan, and Zhang Chi. 2024. Prompt Engineering 101 Prompt Engineering Guidelines from a Linguistic Perspective. In Proceedings of the 23rd Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Main Conference), pages 1408–1426, Taiyuan, China. Chinese Information Processing Society of China.
- Cite (Informal):
- Prompt Engineering 101 Prompt Engineering Guidelines from a Linguistic Perspective (Wenjuan et al., CCL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.ccl-1.108.pdf