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://aclanthology.org/2024.ccl-1.108/
DOI:
Bibkey:
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)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.ccl-1.108.pdf