Guangyuan Jiang


2024

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Prompt Engineering 101 Prompt Engineering Guidelines from a Linguistic Perspective
Wenjuan Han | Xiang Wei | Xingyu Cui | Ning Cheng | Guangyuan Jiang | Weinan Qian | Chi Zhang
Proceedings of the 23rd Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Main Conference)

“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.”