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Prompt Engineering Guide · Applications
Graduate Job Classification Case Study
Clavié et al., 2023 provide a case-study on prompt-engineering applied to a medium-scale text classification use-case in a production system. Using the task of classifying whether a job is a true "entry-level job", suitable for a recent graduate, or not, they evaluated a series of prompt engineering techniques and report their results using GPT-3.5 (gpt-3.5-turbo).
The work shows that LLMs outperforms all other models tested, including an extremely strong baseline in DeBERTa-V3. gpt-3.5-turbo also noticeably outperforms older GPT3 variants in all key metrics, but requires additional output parsing as its ability to stick to a template appears to be worse than the other variants.
The key findings of their prompt engineering approach are:
- For tasks such as this one, where no expert knowledge is required, Few-shot CoT prompting performed worse than Zero-shot prompting in all experiments.
- The impact of the prompt on eliciting the correct reasoning is massive. Simply asking the model to classify a given job results in an F1 score of 65.6, whereas the post-prompt engineering model achieves an F1 score of 91.7.
- Attempting to force the model to stick to a template lowers performance in all cases (this behaviour disappears in early testing with GPT-4, which are posterior to the paper).
- Many small modifications have an outsized impact on performance.
- The tables below show the full modifications tested.
- Properly giving instructions and repeating the key points appears to be the biggest performance driver.
- Something as simple as giving the model a (human) name and referring to it as such increased F1 score by 0.6pts.
Prompt Modifications Tested
| Short name | Description |
|---|---|
| Baseline | Provide a a job posting and asking if it is fit for a graduate. |
| CoT | Give a few examples of accurate classification before querying. |
| Zero-CoT | Ask the model to reason step-by-step before providing its answer. |
| rawinst | Give instructions about its role and the task by adding to the user msg. |
| sysinst | Give instructions about its role and the task as a system msg. |
| bothinst | Split instructions with role as a system msg and task as a user msg. |
| mock | Give task instructions by mocking a discussion where it acknowledges them. |
| reit | Reinforce key elements in the instructions by repeating them. |
| strict | Ask the model to answer by strictly following a given template. |
| loose | Ask for just the final answer to be given following a given template. |
| right | Asking the model to reach the right conclusion. |
| info | Provide additional information to address common reasoning failures. |
| name | Give the model a name by which we refer to it in conversation. |
| pos | Provide the model with positive feedback before querying it. |
Performance Impact of All Prompt Modifications
| Precision | Recall | F1 | Template Stickiness | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline | 61.2 | 70.6 | 65.6 | 79% |
| CoT | 72.6 | 85.1 | 78.4 | 87% |
| Zero-CoT | 75.5 | 88.3 | 81.4 | 65% |
| +rawinst | 80 | 92.4 | 85.8 | 68% |
| +sysinst | 77.7 | 90.9 | 83.8 | 69% |
| +bothinst | 81.9 | 93.9 | 87.5 | 71% |
| +bothinst+mock | 83.3 | 95.1 | 88.8 | 74% |
| +bothinst+mock+reit | 83.8 | 95.5 | 89.3 | 75% |
| +bothinst+mock+reit+strict | 79.9 | 93.7 | 86.3 | 98% |
| +bothinst+mock+reit+loose | 80.5 | 94.8 | 87.1 | 95% |
| +bothinst+mock+reit+right | 84 | 95.9 | 89.6 | 77% |
| +bothinst+mock+reit+right+info | 84.9 | 96.5 | 90.3 | 77% |
| +bothinst+mock+reit+right+info+name | 85.7 | 96.8 | 90.9 | 79% |
| +bothinst+mock+reit+right+info+name+pos | 86.9 | 97 | 91.7 | 81% |
Template stickiness refers to how frequently the model answers in the desired format.