This paper 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 x, 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 paper 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 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 http://pretrain.nlpedia.ai/ including constantly-updated survey, and paperlist.

该研究论文调查和组织了一种新兴的自然语言处理范式，这种范式被称为“基于提示的学习”，并在其中介绍了其基础知识和数学符号，以及其在预训练模型、提示和调整策略等方面的相关研究成果，该框架通过使用模板将输入x修改为具有一些未填充信息的文本字符串提示x'，并将语言模型用于填充未填充信息以获得最终字符串x，从而实现零样本学习和少样本学习。

自然语言处理中提示方法的系统调查：预训练、提示和预测