The language of prompting: What linguistic properties make a prompt successful? (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pretraining and instruction-tuned LLMs can achieve impressive performance on a multitude of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a standard for prompting research to better understand linguistic properties of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed standard would improve the performance of pre-trained and instruction-tuned LLMs on a multitude of tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on prompt quality show imbalanced support across models and tasks, and research gaps. |
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Beyond English: The Impact of Prompt Translation Strategies across Languages and Tasks in Multilingual LLMs (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Current LLMs are primarily trained on English data but also include data from other languages. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that translation-based prompting is not universally optimal for multilingual LLMs. |
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A Study on Accessing Linguistic Information in Pre-Trained Language Models by Using Prompts (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to access linguistic information in pre-trained multilingual language models are difficult to use. |
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| Challenge: | PromptPrism is a linguistically-inspired taxonomy that enables prompt analysis across three hierarchical levels. |
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| Challenge: | ambiguity in natural language can hinder performance of large language models. |
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Demystifying Prompts in Language Models via Perplexity Estimation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Language models can be prompted to perform a wide variety of tasks with zero- and few-shot learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically extend a small seed set of manually written prompts by paraphrasing with GPT3 and backtranslation. |
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Revisiting Automated Prompting: Are We Actually Doing Better? (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent work demonstrates that Large Language Models are great few-shot learners, and prompting significantly increases their performance on a range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They revisit techniques for automated prompting on six different downstream tasks and a larger range of K-shot learning settings. |
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How Important is ‘Perfect’ English for Machine Translation Prompts? (2026.findings-eacl)
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Patrícia Schmidtová, Niyati Bafna, Seth Aycock, Gianluca Vico, Wiktor Kamzela, Kathy Hämmerl, Vilém Zouhar
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are largely trained on and respond best to English prompts, but are also sensitive to errors in user prompts. |
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Exploiting Language Model Prompts Using Similarity Measures: A Case Study on the Word-in-Context Task (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing few-shot approaches fail on the semantic distinction task of the Word-in-Context dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based approach which boosts few-shot performance to the level of fully supervised methods by using similarity metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique boosts few-shot performance to the level of fully supervised methods. |