Designing Informative Metrics for Few-Shot Example Selection

Rishabh Adiga, Lakshmi Subramanian, Varun Chandrasekaran


Abstract
Pretrained language models (PLMs) have shown remarkable few-shot learning capabilities when provided with properly formatted examples. However, selecting the “best” examples remains an open challenge. We propose a complexity-based prompt selection approach for sequence tagging tasks. This approach avoids the training of a dedicated model for selection of examples, and instead uses certain metrics to align the syntactico-semantic complexity of test sentences and examples. We use both sentence- and word-level metrics to match the complexity of examples to the (test) sentence being considered. Our results demonstrate that our approach extracts greater performance from PLMs: it achieves state-of-the-art performance on few-shot NER, achieving a 5% absolute improvement in F1 score on the CoNLL2003 dataset for GPT-4. We also see large gains of upto 28.85 points (F1/Acc.) in smaller models like GPT-j-6B.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.602
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10127–10135
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.602
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rishabh Adiga, Lakshmi Subramanian, and Varun Chandrasekaran. 2024. Designing Informative Metrics for Few-Shot Example Selection. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 10127–10135, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Designing Informative Metrics for Few-Shot Example Selection (Adiga et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.602.pdf