Do Prompts Solve NLP Tasks Using Natural Language?

2 Mar 2022 · Sen yang, Yunchen Zhang, Leyang Cui, Yue Zhang ·

Thanks to the advanced improvement of large pre-trained language models, prompt-based fine-tuning is shown to be effective on a variety of downstream tasks. Though many prompting methods have been investigated, it remains unknown which type of prompts are the most effective among three types of prompts (i.e., human-designed prompts, schema prompts and null prompts). In this work, we empirically compare the three types of prompts under both few-shot and fully-supervised settings. Our experimental results show that schema prompts are the most effective in general. Besides, the performance gaps tend to diminish when the scale of training data grows large.

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