Cited by 4,361Topic ModelingDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningNatural Language Processing Techniques

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 156 of the 156 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; 115 of the 164 sources its claims cite were checked for support.

Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing

Open access

Abstract

This article surveys and organizes research works in a new paradigm in natural language processing, which we dub “prompt-based learning.” Unlike traditional supervised learning, which trains a model to take in an input x and predict an output y as P ( y|x ), prompt-based learning is based on language models that model the probability of text directly. To use these models to perform prediction tasks, the original input x is modified using a template into a textual string prompt x′ that has some unfilled slots, and then the language model is used to probabilistically fill the unfilled information to obtain a final string x̂ , from which the final output y can be derived. This framework is powerful and attractive for a number of reasons: It allows the language model to be pre-trained on massive amounts of raw text, and by defining a new prompting function the model is able to perform few-shot or even zero-shot learning, adapting to new scenarios with few or no labeled data. In this article, we introduce the basics of this promising paradigm, describe a unified set of mathematical notations that can cover a wide variety of existing work, and organize existing work along several dimensions, e.g., the choice of pre-trained language models, prompts, and tuning strategies. To make the field more accessible to interested beginners, we not only make a systematic review of existing works and a highly structured typology of prompt-based concepts but also release other resources, e.g., a website NLPedia–Pretrain including constantly updated survey and paperlist.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3560815

Cites

156 of 156 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

115 of 164 cited sources checked · 62 supported · 2 flagged · accuracy not yet measured

Show all 57 claims

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 118
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 53
143 of 143
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    For many NLP tasks, large amounts of annotated data cannot be found.

    “The main issue with supervised learning is that to train a model P (y|x; θ ), it is necessary to have annotated data for the task, which for many tasks cannot be found in large amounts.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Creating and experimenting with prompts is an art that takes time and experience.

    “Creating and experimenting with these prompts is an art that takes time and experience, particularly for some complicated tasks such as semantic parsing [124]”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The prompt specifies the task.

    “Given that the prompt specifies the task, choosing a proper prompt template has a large effect not only on the accuracy but also on which task the model performs in the first place.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Manually created answers may be sub-optimal for getting the LM to achieve ideal prediction performance.

    “As with manually created prompts, it is possible that manually created answers are sub-optimal for getting the LM to achieve ideal prediction performance.”
4 of 4

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

  • Table 5 is described as a prompt list but covers related research topics

    Minor

    The resource list assigns Table 5 a different subject from the displayed table.

  • Text-generation prompt ensembling is both reviewed and said to be unstudied

    Minor

    Section 5.1 describes existing work on prompt ensembling for generation tasks, but Section 9.5 says no such study has been performed.

  • Table 1 is described as covering two different subjects

    Minor

    The resource list says Table 1 compares pre-trained language models, but the displayed Table 1 is about four NLP paradigms.

  • Table 4 is described as a timeline but presents tuning strategies

    Minor

    The resource list identifies Table 4 as a research timeline, whereas its displayed title identifies it as a comparison of tuning strategies.

  • The Yin et al. citation points to a different reference

    Minor

    The text cites Yin et al. as reference 144, but entry 144 is by Yang et al.; the Yin et al. paper appears as entry 145.

5 of 5

Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Show all 145 references

Research works printed but not linked: 12

  1. Duo Chai, Wei Wu, Qinghong Han, Fei Wu, and Jiwei Li. 2020. Description based text classification with reinforcement learning. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 1371–1382.
  2. Junyoung Chung, Caglar Gulcehre, Kyunghyun Cho, and Yoshua Bengio. 2014. Empirical evaluation of gated recurrent neural networks on sequence modeling. In Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Workshop on Deep Learning.
  3. Hal Daumé III and Eric Brill. 2004. Web search intent induction via automatic query reformulation. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL’04), Short Papers. Association for Computational Linguistics, Boston, 49–52.
  4. Kevin Duh, Katsuhito Sudoh, Xianchao Wu, Hajime Tsukada, and Masaaki Nagata. 2011. Generalized minimum bayes risk system combination. In Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing. 1356–1360.
  5. Chelsea Finn, Pieter Abbeel, and Sergey Levine. 2017. Model-agnostic meta-learning for fast adaptation of deep networks. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 1126–1135.
  6. Bernardino Romera-Paredes and Philip Torr. 2015. An embarrassingly simple approach to zero-shot learning. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 2152–2161.
  7. 10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.208 · DOI · Paper page
  8. Maria Tsimpoukelli, Jacob Menick, Serkan Cabi, S. M. Ali Eslami, Oriol Vinyals, and Felix Hill. 2021. Multimodal few-shot learning with frozen language models. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS’21), Marc’Aurelio Ranzato, Alina Beygelzimer, Yann N. Dauphin, Percy Liang, and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan (Eds.). 200–212.
  9. Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. 2017. Attention is all you need. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 5998–6008.
  10. 10.5555/2002736.2002777 · DOI
  11. Zihao Zhao, Eric Wallace, Shi Feng, Dan Klein, and Sameer Singh. 2021. Calibrate before use: Improving few-shot performance of language models. In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML’21), Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, Vol. 139, Marina Meila and Tong Zhang (Eds.). PMLR, 12697–12706. http://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/zhao21c.html.
  12. 10.5555/2390524.2390609 · DOI

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 1,001–1,100 of 3,933

Metadata

Authors
Liu, P., Yuan, W., Fu, J., Jiang, Z., Hayashi, H., & Neubig, G.
Affiliations
  • Carnegie Mellon University (US)
  • National University of Singapore (SG)
Venue
ACM Computing Surveys
Published
2023-01-16
Volume
55
Issue
9
Pages
1-35
ISSN
  • 0360-0300 (ISSN-L)
  • 1557-7341
OpenAlex
W3185341429
Cited by
4,361
References
145
Citations by year
2026: 638 · 2025: 1253 · 2024: 1233 · 2023: 929
FWCI
303.73
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM Computing Surveys (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
Keywords
prompt learning, prompting, pre-trained language models, few-shot learning, zero-shot learning, prompt templates, prompt tuning, language model fine-tuning

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-10-11, under version 3 of the claim definition (model deepseek-v4.1-flash, prompt extract-v3).

A second model labelled each claim on 2026-10-11 (model jev-1.13-20260917, definition revision gold-guideline-v0.2).

Cited sources are checked with a language model’s help (gpt-6-sol).

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

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