-- Prompt engineering has emerged as a useful way studying the algorithmic tendencies and biases of large language models (LLMs). Meanwhile c reatives and academics have leveraged LLMs to develop creative works and explore the boundaries of their writing capabilities through text - generation and code. This study suggests that creative text prompting, specifically "Poetry Prompt Patterns," may be a useful addition to the prompt engineer's toolbox, and outlines the process by which this approach may be taken. Then, the paper uses poetic prompts to assess three models' descriptions and evaluations of a renowned poet and test the consequences of models' willingness to adapt or rewrite original creative works for presumed audiences. Since the release of public - facing chat - style large language model (LLM) natural language generators (NLGs) like ChatGPT and Claude, public debate has acknowledged their great potential for creativity, as well as the ways in which they can be leveraged to make representations that don't reflect reality.

The performance of large language models (LLMs) depends on how they are prompted, with choices spanning both the high-level prompting pattern (e.g., Zero-Shot, CoT, ReAct, ReWOO) and the specific prompt content (instructions and few-shot demonstrations). Manually tuning this combination is tedious, error-prone, and specific to a given LLM and task. Therefore, this paper proposes AutoPDL, an automated approach to discovering good LLM agent configurations. Our approach frames this as a structured AutoML problem over a combinatorial space of agentic and non-agentic prompting patterns and demonstrations, using successive halving to efficiently navigate this space. We introduce a library implementing common prompting patterns using the PDL prompt programming language. AutoPDL solutions are human-readable, editable, and executable PDL programs that use this library. This approach also enables source-to-source optimization, allowing human-in-the-loop refinement and reuse. Evaluations across three tasks and seven LLMs (ranging from 3B to 70B parameters) show consistent accuracy gains ($9.21\pm15.46$ percentage points), up to 67.5pp, and reveal that selected prompting strategies vary across models and tasks.

The application of Large Language Models (LLMs) is growing in the productive completion of Software Engineering tasks. Yet, studies investigating the productive prompting techniques often employed a limited problem space, primarily focusing on well-known prompting patterns and mainly targeting function-level SE practices. We identify significant gaps in real-world workflows that involve complexities beyond class-level (e.g., multi-class dependencies) and different features that can impact Human-LLM Interactions (HLIs) processes in code generation. To address these issues, we designed an experiment that comprehensively analyzed the HLI features regarding the code generation productivity. Our study presents two project-level benchmark tasks, extending beyond function-level evaluations. We conducted a user study with 36 participants from diverse backgrounds, asking them to solve the assigned tasks by interacting with the GPT assistant using specific prompting patterns. We also examined the participants' experience and their behavioral features during interactions by analyzing screen recordings and GPT chat logs. Our statistical and empirical investigation revealed (1) that three out of 15 HLI features significantly impacted the productivity in code generation; (2) five primary guidelines for enhancing productivity for HLI processes; and (3) a taxonomy of 29 runtime and logic errors that can occur during HLI processes, along with suggested mitigation plans.

In recent years, transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have revolutionised natural language processing (NLP), with generative models opening new possibilities for tasks that require context-aware text generation. Requirements engineering (RE) has also seen a surge in the experimentation of LLMs for different tasks, including trace-link detection, regulatory compliance, and others. Requirements classification is a common task in RE. While non-generative LLMs like BERT have been successfully applied to this task, there has been limited exploration of generative LLMs. This gap raises an important question: how well can generative LLMs, which produce context-aware outputs, perform in requirements classification? In this study, we explore the effectiveness of three generative LLMs-Bloom, Gemma, and Llama-in performing both binary and multi-class requirements classification. We design an extensive experimental study involving over 400 experiments across three widely used datasets (PROMISE NFR, Functional-Quality, and SecReq). Our study concludes that while factors like prompt design and LLM architecture are universally important, others-such as dataset variations-have a more situational impact, depending on the complexity of the classification task. This insight can guide future model development and deployment strategies, focusing on optimising prompt structures and aligning model architectures with task-specific needs for improved performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly transformed software development, especially in code generation. However, their inconsistent performance, prone to hallucinations and quality issues, complicates program comprehension and hinders maintainability. Research indicates that prompt engineering-the practice of designing inputs to direct LLMs toward generating relevant outputs-may help address these challenges. In this regard, researchers have introduced prompt patterns, structured templates intended to guide users in formulating their requests. However, the influence of prompt patterns on code quality has yet to be thoroughly investigated. An improved understanding of this relationship would be essential to advancing our collective knowledge on how to effectively use LLMs for code generation, thereby enhancing their understandability in contemporary software development. This paper empirically investigates the impact of prompt patterns on code quality, specifically maintainability, security, and reliability, using the Dev-GPT dataset. Results show that Zero-Shot prompting is most common, followed by Zero-Shot with Chain-of-Thought and Few-Shot. Analysis of 7583 code files across quality metrics revealed minimal issues, with Kruskal-Wallis tests indicating no significant differences among patterns, suggesting that prompt structure may not substantially impact these quality metrics in ChatGPT-assisted code generation.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has highlighted the importance of prompt engineering as a crucial technique for optimizing model outputs. While experimentation with various prompting methods, such as Few-shot, Chain-of-Thought, and role-based techniques, has yielded promising results, these advancements remain fragmented across academic papers, blog posts and anecdotal experimentation. The lack of a single, unified resource to consolidate the field's knowledge impedes the progress of both research and practical application. This paper argues for the creation of an overarching framework that synthesizes existing methodologies into a cohesive overview for practitioners. Using a design-based research approach, we present the Prompt Canvas, a structured framework resulting from an extensive literature review on prompt engineering that captures current knowledge and expertise. By combining the conceptual foundations and practical strategies identified in prompt engineering, the Prompt Canvas provides a practical approach for leveraging the potential of Large Language Models. It is primarily designed as a learning resource for pupils, students and employees, offering a structured introduction to prompt engineering. This work aims to contribute to the growing discourse on prompt engineering by establishing a unified methodology for researchers and providing guidance for practitioners.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in a wide array of natural language processing tasks. However, its effectiveness over discourse-level event relation extraction (ERE) tasks remains unexplored. In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of LLMs in addressing discourse-level ERE tasks characterized by lengthy documents and intricate relations encompassing coreference, temporal, causal, and subevent types. Evaluation is conducted using an commercial model, GPT-3.5, and an open-source model, LLaMA-2. Our study reveals a notable underperformance of LLMs compared to the baseline established through supervised learning. Although Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) can improve LLMs performance, it does not scale well compared to the smaller supervised baseline model. Our quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that LLMs have several weaknesses when applied for extracting event relations, including a tendency to fabricate event mentions, and failures to capture transitivity rules among relations, detect long distance relations, or comprehend contexts with dense event mentions.

Individual feedback can help students improve their essay writing skills. However, the manual effort required to provide such feedback limits individualization in practice. Automatically-generated essay feedback may serve as an alternative to guide students at their own pace, convenience, and desired frequency. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in generating coherent and contextually relevant text. Yet, their ability to provide helpful essay feedback is unclear. This work explores several prompting strategies for LLM-based zero-shot and few-shot generation of essay feedback. Inspired by Chain-of-Thought prompting, we study how and to what extent automated essay scoring (AES) can benefit the quality of generated feedback. We evaluate both the AES performance that LLMs can achieve with prompting only and the helpfulness of the generated essay feedback. Our results suggest that tackling AES and feedback generation jointly improves AES performance. However, while our manual evaluation emphasizes the quality of the generated essay feedback, the impact of essay scoring on the generated feedback remains low ultimately.

The fairness and trustworthiness of Large Language Models (LLMs) are receiving increasing attention. Implicit hate speech, which employs indirect language to convey hateful intentions, occupies a significant portion of practice. However, the extent to which LLMs effectively address this issue remains insufficiently examined. This paper delves into the capability of LLMs to detect implicit hate speech (Classification Task) and express confidence in their responses (Calibration Task). Our evaluation meticulously considers various prompt patterns and mainstream uncertainty estimation methods. Our findings highlight that LLMs exhibit two extremes: (1) LLMs display excessive sensitivity towards groups or topics that may cause fairness issues, resulting in misclassifying benign statements as hate speech. (2) LLMs' confidence scores for each method excessively concentrate on a fixed range, remaining unchanged regardless of the dataset's complexity. Consequently, the calibration performance is heavily reliant on primary classification accuracy. These discoveries unveil new limitations of LLMs, underscoring the need for caution when optimizing models to ensure they do not veer towards extremes. This serves as a reminder to carefully consider sensitivity and confidence in the pursuit of model fairness.

Autocomplete is a task where the user inputs a piece of text, termed prompt, which is conditioned by the model to generate semantically coherent continuation. Existing works for this task have primarily focused on datasets (e.g., email, chat) with high frequency user prompt patterns (or focused prompts) where word-based language models have been quite effective. In this work, we study the more challenging open-domain setting consisting of low frequency user prompt patterns (or broad prompts, e.g., prompt about 93rd academy awards) and demonstrate the effectiveness of character-based language models. We study this problem under memory-constrained settings (e.g., edge devices and smartphones), where character-based representation is effective in reducing the overall model size (in terms of parameters). We use WikiText-103 benchmark to simulate broad prompts and demonstrate that character models rival word models in exact match accuracy for the autocomplete task, when controlled for the model size. For instance, we show that a 20M parameter character model performs similar to an 80M parameter word model in the vanilla setting. We further propose novel methods to improve character models by incorporating inductive bias in the form of compositional information and representation transfer from large word models. Datasets and code used in this work are available at https://github.com/UBC-NLP/char_autocomplete.