How to prompt LLMs to get a concise answer for a question?

Question

I use LLMs for QA tasks. The following prompt sent to Llama-2-13b-chat-hf:

Give a precise answer to the question based on the context. Don't be verbose.
CONTEXT: .....
QUESTION: what is the commission rate?
ANSWER:

It gives me the answer like:

The commission rate is 20%

How to prompt so that it can give the answer without a full sentence like:

20%

In order to get it to output the exact value you have to tell it to output the exact value type. When I told it to output only the number it gave only the number. If you want other cases you'll have to change the prompt to match the value type. — Alias Cartellano, Commented Sep 15, 2023 at 22:01

galacticninja · Accepted Answer · 2023-09-16 04:20:35Z

4

Add a restriction like the following to your prompt:

Do not reply using a complete sentence, and only give the answer in the following format: xx%.

Example:

75 is what percentage of 150? Do not reply using a complete sentence, and only give the answer in the following format: xx%.

Both ChatGPT and Bard give this as their response to the prompt above:

50%

Without the restriction in the prompt, both ChatGPT and Bard will give responses that consist of one or more sentences.

answered Sep 16, 2023 at 4:20

galacticninja

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This is helpful. The key in my QA case was adding the instruction after the input (question, in this case) instead of giving the instruction first and then asking a question.
– Pedram
Commented Mar 31 at 8:07

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