Cited by 113Topic ModelingNatural Language Processing TechniquesDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

Demystifying Prompts in Language Models via Perplexity Estimation

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Gonen, Hila, Iyer, Srini, Blevins, Terra, Smith, Noah, Zettlemoyer, Luke·2023·Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Abstract

Language models can be prompted to perform a wide variety of tasks with zero-and few-shot incontext learning.However, performance varies significantly with the choice of prompt, and we do not yet understand why this happens.In this paper, we analyze the factors that contribute to this variance and establish a new empirical hypothesis: the performance of a prompt is predicted by the extent to which the model is familiar with the language it contains.Over a wide range of tasks, we show that the lower the perplexity of the prompt, the better it is able to perform the task, when considering reasonable prompts that are related to it.As part of our analysis, we also devise a method to automatically extend a small seed set of manually written prompts by paraphrasing with GPT3 and backtranslation.This larger set allows us to verify that perplexity is a strong predictor of the success of a prompt and we show that the lowest perplexity prompts are consistently effective.

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Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.679

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

  • This provides a clear signal for detection methods like Perplexity and Min-K% Prob.

    “This provides a clear signal for detection methods like Perplexity (Gonen et al., 2023) and Min-K% Prob (Shi et al., 2024), which are built upon this likelihood principle.”

    From Detecting Data Contamination from Reinforcement Learning Post-training for Large Language Models (2025) · cites this paper as Gonen et al., 2023

    The Prompt Accuracy section describes prompt perplexity as a proxy for how expected a prompt is by a model, supporting a connection between perplexity and model likelihood. But the paper uses that measure to study and select prompts; it does not present Perplexity as a detection method or establish a clear signal for detection. No page number is available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.82)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. George A Miller. 1995. Wordnet: a lexical database for english. Communications of the ACM, 38(11):39-41.
  2. John Wieting, Jonathan Mallinson, and Kevin Gimpel. 2017. Learning paraphrastic sentence embeddings from back-translated bitext. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 274-285.

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Authors
Gonen, H., Iyer, S., Blevins, T., Smith, N., & Zettlemoyer, L.
Affiliations
  • University of Washington (US)
  • Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (US)
Venue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Published
2023
Pages
10136-10148
OpenAlex
W4389520255
Cited by
109
References
32
Citations by year
2026: 14 · 2025: 33 · 2024: 30 · 2023: 31 · 2022: 1
FWCI
19.14
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP (Findings of EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
Keywords
prompt engineering, language models, in-context learning, zero-shot learning, few-shot learning, paraphrase, back-translation

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