We maintain an up-to-date list of terms
and techniques at LearnPrompting.org

prefix prompts (Shin
et al., 2020a) rather than cloze prompts (Petroni
et al., 2019; Cui et al., 2021),

Hard prompts

soft prompts

study task-agnostic techniques

PRISMA process (Page et al., 2021) (Section 2.1)
to identify 58 different text-based prompting tech-
niques

we test a
range of prompting techniques against the com-
monly used benchmark MMLU (Hendrycks et al.,
2021).

second, we explore in detail an exam-
ple of manual prompt engineering on a significant,
real-world use case, identifying signals of frantic
hopelessness–a top indicator of suicidal crisis–in
the text of individuals seeking support (Schuck
et al., 2019a).

Prompt Template Prompts are often constructed
via a prompt template (Shin et al., 2020b).

Components of a Promp

Directive

an instruction or question

"intent"

single instruction

Examples,

one example) prompt

Style Instructions Style instructions are a type of
output formatting

Role A Role, also known as a persona (Schmidt
et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023l)

Pretend you are a shepherd and write a lim-
erick about llamas

Additional Information

Additional Information is sometimes called ‘con-
text‘

Prompt Chain A prompt chain (activity: prompt
chaining) consists of two or more prompt templates
used in succession. The output of the prompt gen-
erated by the first prompt template is used to pa-
rameterize the second template, continuing until all
templates are exhauste

Prompt engineering is the
iterative process of developing a prompt by modify-
ing or changing the prompting technique that you
are using