Justify Your Prompts!
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: When you use a large language model (LLM) in your research, you often need to formulate a prompt to elicit some relevant output from the LLM. This step is challenging since (1) LLMs are known to be brittle and their results may vary drastically between different prompts; and (2) for any given task, there are infinitely many possible prompts. Thus we end up with the following problem: If you cannot try out infinitely many prompts, how do you justify your selected prompt? This article discusses different ways in which authors may motivate their choices, and urges authors to consider how their prompting strategy might be justified.
Source: Computational Linguistics
DOI: 10.1162/coli.a.620
Language: English
Topic: Topic Modeling
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7154467039