Prompt position really matters in few-shot and zero-shot NLU tasks

Prompt-based models have made remarkable advancements in the fields of zero-shot and few-shot learning, attracting a lot of attention from researchers. Developing an effective prompt template plays a critical role. However, prior studies have mainly focused on prompt vocabulary selection or embedding initialization with the reserved prompt position fixed. In this empirical study, we conduct the most comprehensive analysis to date of prompt position option for natural language understanding tasks. Our findings quantify the substantial impact prompt position has on model performance. We observe that the prompt position used in prior studies is often sub-optimal for both zero-shot and few-shot settings. These findings suggest prompt position optimisation as an interesting research direction alongside the existing focus on prompt engineering.