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Prompt engineering is a challenging yet crucial task for optimizing the performance of large language models on customized tasks. It requires complex reasoning to examine the model&#39;s errors, hypothesize what is missing or misleading in the current prompt, and communicate the task with clarity. While recent works indicate that large language models can be meta-prompted to perform automatic prompt engineering, we argue that their potential is limited due to insufficient guidance for complex reasoning in the meta-prompt. We fill this gap by infusing into the meta-prompt three key components: detailed descriptions, context specification, and a step-by-step reasoning template. The resulting method, named PE2, showcases remarkable versatility across diverse language tasks. It finds prompts that outperform &quot;let&#39;s think step by step&quot; by 6.3% on MultiArith and 3.1% on GSM8K, and outperforms competitive baselines on counterfactual tasks by 6.9%. Further, we show that PE2 can make targeted prompt edits, rectify erroneous prompts, and induce multi-step plans for complex tasks.

ACL 2024

Prompt Engineering a Prompt Engineer

prompt engineering

large language models

reasoning

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Prompt engineering is a challenging yet crucial task for optimizing the performance of large language models on customized tasks. It requires complex reasoning to examine the model's errors, hypothesize what is missing or misleading in the current prompt, and communicate the task with clarity. While recent works indicate that large language models can be meta-prompted to perform automatic prompt engineering, we argue that their potential is limited due to insufficient guidance for complex reasoning in the meta-prompt. We fill this gap by infusing into the meta-prompt three key components: detailed descriptions, context specification, and a step-by-step reasoning template. The resulting method, named PE2, showcases remarkable versatility across diverse language tasks. It finds prompts that outperform "let's think step by step" by 6.3% on MultiArith and 3.1% on GSM8K, and outperforms competitive baselines on counterfactual tasks by 6.9%. Further, we show that PE2 can make targeted prompt edits, rectify erroneous prompts, and induce multi-step plans for complex tasks.

poster

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Using novel approaches to dataset development, the Biasly dataset captures the nuance and subtlety of misogyny in ways that are unique within the literature. Built in collaboration with multi-disciplinary experts and annotators themselves, the dataset contains annotations of movie subtitles, capturing colloquial expressions of misogyny in North American film. The open-source dataset can be used for a range of NLP tasks, including binary and multi-label classification, severity score regression, and text generation for rewrites. In this paper, we discuss the methodology used, analyze the annotations obtained, provide baselines for each task using common NLP algorithms, and furnish error analyses to give insight into model behaviour when fine-tuned on the Biasly dataset.

Biasly: An Expert-Annotated Dataset for Subtle Misogyny Detection and Mitigation

Neural-symbolic methods have demonstrated efficiency in enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods mainly rely on syntactically mapping natural languages to complete formal languages like Python and SQL. Those methods require that reasoning tasks be convertible into programs, which cater to the computer execution mindset and deviate from human reasoning habits. To broaden symbolic methods' applicability and adaptability in the real world, we propose Meta-Reasoning from a linguistic perspective. This method empowers LLMs to deconstruct reasoning-independent semantic information into generic symbolic representations, thereby efficiently capturing more generalized reasoning knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments on more than ten datasets encompassing conventional reasoning tasks like arithmetic, symbolic, and logical reasoning, and the more complex interactive reasoning tasks like theory-of-mind reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that Meta-Reasoning significantly enhances in-context reasoning accuracy, learning efficiency, out-of-domain generalization, and output stability compared to the Chain-of-Thought technique.

Meta-Reasoning: Semantics-Symbol Deconstruction for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are leading significant progress in code generation. Beyond one-pass code generation, recent works further integrate unit tests and program verifiers into LLMs to iteratively refine the generated programs. However, these works consider the generated programs as an indivisible entity, which falls short for LLMs in debugging the programs, especially when the programs contain complex logic flows and data operations. In contrast, when human developers debug programs, they typically set breakpoints and selectively examine runtime execution information. The execution flow and the intermediate variables play a crucial role in the debugging process, yet they are underutilized in the existing literature on code generation. In this study, we introduce Large Language Model Debugger (LDB), a novel debugging framework that enables LLMs to refine their generated programs with the runtime execution information. Specifically, LDB segments the programs into basic blocks and tracks the values of intermediate variables after each block throughout the runtime execution. This allows LLMs to concentrate on simpler code units within the overall execution flow, verify their correctness against the task description block by block, and efficiently pinpoint any potential errors. Experiments demonstrate that LDB consistently enhances the baseline performance by up to 9.8% across the HumanEval, MBPP, and TransCoder benchmarks, archiving new state-of-the-art performance in code debugging for various LLM selections.

Debug like a Human: A Large Language Model Debugger via Verifying Runtime Execution Step by Step

Online social media platforms often gather user feedback through polls to enhance user engagement. Automatically generating polls from social media and its context can decrease the labor expenses of media workers and enhance workplace productivity. However, on social media platforms, there are internet water armies that manipulate public opinion through sheer numbers and causing the comments to be biased, drowning out minority views. In such circumstances, polls created based on biased comments often have limited types of options and poor coverage. Therefore, it is crucial to diversify the poll options and try to listen to the voices of the minority. To achieve this, we introduce DiffusPoll, a novel paradigm for poll generation based on a non-autoregressive diffusion model that can generate diversified and high-quality samples. Under the new paradigm, we design a task-specific mask strategy tailored to the inherent logic of polls to optimize controlled generation. Furthermore, we also leverage additional attribute tags from comments to enhance the generation quality. Experimental results indicate that DiffusPoll has achieved state-of-the-art performance in both the quality and diversity of poll generation tasks, and is more likely to hit the voices of minority.

DiffusPoll: Conditional Text Diffusion Model for Poll Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have attracted great attention given their strong performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. In practice, users often expect generated texts to fall within a specific length range, making length controlled generation an important topic, especially for GPT-style models. Existing length control methods mostly focus on a simple control type of ``equal to'' a target length. Different from them, we propose a prompt-based method to achieve length controlled generation under different control types with high accuracy. In particular, we adopt reinforcement learning (RL) and sample filtering with the reward signal given by rule-based reward models, which enhances the length control ability of models by rewarding outputs that follow certain control instructions. In addition, we introduce a standard prompt extractor to parse arbitrary users' input into standard control instructions. Experiments show that our method significantly improves the accuracy of prompt-based length control on popular summarization datasets like CNNDM and NYT under multiple control types. Moreover, both the standard prompt extractor and RL-tuned model show strong generalization to unseen control prompt templates.

Prompt-Based Length Controlled Generation with Multiple Control Types

Since commonsense information has been recorded significantly less frequently than its existence, language models pre-trained by text generation have difficulty to learn sufficient commonsense knowledge. Several studies have leveraged text retrieval to augment the models' commonsense ability. Unlike text, images capture commonsense information inherently but little effort has been paid to effectively utilize them. In this work, we propose a novel $\textbf{M}$ulti-m$\textbf{O}$dal $\textbf{RE}$trieval (MORE) augmentation framework, to leverage both text and images to enhance the commonsense ability of language models. Extensive experiments on the Common-Gen task have demonstrated the efficacy of MORE based on the pre-trained models of both single and multiple modalities.

MORE: Multi-mOdal REtrieval Augmented Generative Commonsense Reasoning

Learning job title representation is a vital process for developing automatic human resource tools. To do so, existing methods primarily rely on learning the title representation through skills extracted from the job description, neglecting the rich and diverse content within. Thus, we propose an alternative framework for learning job titles through their respective job description (JD) and utilize a Job Description Aggregator component to handle the lengthy description and bidirectional contrastive loss to account for the bidirectional relationship between the job title and its description. We evaluated the performance of our method on both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, achieving a superior performance over the skill-based approach.

Learning Job Title Representation from Job Description Aggregation Network

Continual Named Entity Recognition (CNER) is dedicated to sequentially learning new entity types while mitigating catastrophic forgetting of old entity types. Traditional CNER approaches commonly employ knowledge distillation to retain old knowledge within the current model. However, because only the representations of old and new models are constrained to be consistent, the reliance solely on distillation in existing methods still suffers from catastrophic forgetting. To further alleviate the forgetting issue of old entity types, this paper introduces flexible Weight Tuning (WT) and Weight Fusion (WF) strategies for CNER. The WT strategy, applied at each training step, employs a learning rate schedule on the parameters of the current model. After learning the current task, the WF strategy dynamically integrates knowledge from both the current and previous models for inference. Notably, these two strategies are model-agnostic and seamlessly integrate with existing State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the WT and WF strategies consistently enhance the performance of previous SOTA methods across ten CNER settings in three datasets.

Flexible Weight Tuning and Weight Fusion Strategies for Continual Named Entity Recognition

Traditional applications of natural language processing (NLP) in healthcare have predominantly focused on patient-centered services, enhancing patient interactions and care delivery, such as through medical dialogue systems. However, the potential of NLP to benefit inexperienced doctors, particularly in areas such as communicative medical coaching, remains largely unexplored. We introduce "ChatCoach", a human-AI cooperative framework designed to assist medical learners in practicing their communication skills during patient consultations. ChatCoach differentiates itself from conventional dialogue systems by offering a simulated environment where medical learners can practice dialogues with a patient agent, while a coach agent provides immediate, structured feedback. This is facilitated by our proposed Generalized Chain-of-Thought (GCoT) approach, which fosters the generation of structured feedback and enhances the utilization of external knowledge sources. Additionally, we have developed a dataset specifically for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) within the ChatCoach framework on communicative medical coaching tasks. Our empirical results validate the effectiveness of ChatCoach.

Benchmarking Large Language Models on Communicative Medical Coaching: A Dataset and a Novel System

This paper introduces INTERVENOR (INTERactiVE chaiN Of Repair), a system designed to emulate the interactive code repair processes observed in humans, encompassing both code diagnosis and code repair. INTERVENOR prompts Large Language Models (LLMs) to play distinct roles during the code repair process, functioning as both a Code Learner and a Code Teacher. Specifically, the Code Learner is tasked with adhering to instructions to generate or repair code, while the Code Teacher is responsible for crafting a Chain-of-Repair (CoR) to serve as guidance for the Code Learner. During generating the CoR, the Code Teacher needs to check the generated codes from Code Learner and reassess how to address code bugs based on error feedback received from compilers. Experimental results demonstrate that INTERVENOR surpasses baseline models, exhibiting improvements of approximately 18% and 4.3% over GPT-3.5 in code generation and code translation tasks, respectively. Our further analyses show that CoR is effective to illuminate the reasons behind bugs and outline solution plans in natural language. With the feedback of code compilers, INTERVENOR can accurately identify syntax errors and assertion errors and provide precise instructions to repair codes. All data and codes are available at [https://github.com/NEUIR/INTERVENOR](https://github.com/NEUIR/INTERVENOR).

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Biasly: An Expert-Annotated Dataset for Subtle Misogyny Detection and Mitigation

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