# PTR: Prompt Tuning with Rules for Text Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.11259 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11259/

## Key facts

- Cited by 238 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [GPT Understands, Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10385/) (2021)
- [Text Summarization with Pretrained Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08345/) (2019)
- [Pre-trained Models for Natural Language Processing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08271/) (2020)
- [Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09977/) (2020)
- [Efficient Intent Detection with Dual Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04807/) (2020)
- [An Evaluation Dataset for Intent Classification and Out-of-Scope Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02027/) (2019)
- [Fine-Tuning Pretrained Language Models: Weight Initializations, Data Orders, and Early Stopping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06305/) (2020)
- [LUKE: Deep Contextualized Entity Representations with Entity-aware Self-attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01057/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Enhanced Contextual Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04164/) (2019)
- [Matching the Blanks: Distributional Similarity for Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03158/) (2019)
- [AutoPrompt: Eliciting Knowledge from Language Models with Automatically Generated Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15980/) (2020)
- [A Simple Method for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02847/) (2018)
- [Multilingual Universal Sentence Encoder for Semantic Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04307/) (2019)
- [Commonsense Knowledge Mining from Pretrained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00505/) (2019)
- [KnowPrompt: Knowledge-aware Prompt-tuning with Synergistic Optimization for Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07650/) (2021)
- [Few-NERD: A Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07464/) (2021)
- [Graph Convolution over Pruned Dependency Trees Improves Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10185/) (2018)
- [Mixout: Effective Regularization to Finetune Large-scale Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11299/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 238)

- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07602/) (2021)
- [A Prompt Pattern Catalog to Enhance Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11382/) (2023)
- [Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing via Large Pre-Trained Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01243/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models for Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10620/) (2023)
- [Pre-Trained Models: Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07139/) (2021)
- [Exploring Visual Prompts for Adapting Large-Scale Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17274/) (2022)
- [Prompt Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03340/) (2022)
- [PPT: Pre-trained Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04332/) (2021)
- [Knowledgeable Prompt-tuning: Incorporating Knowledge into Prompt Verbalizer for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02035/) (2021)
- [Reframing Instructional Prompts to GPTk's Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07830/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18013/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Study of Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01286/) (2024)
- [A Review on Language Models as Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06031/) (2022)
- [Active Prompting with Chain-of-Thought for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12246/) (2023)
- [OpenPrompt: An Open-source Framework for Prompt-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01998/) (2021)
- [AugGPT: Leveraging ChatGPT for Text Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13007/) (2023)
- [Automatic Prompt Augmentation and Selection with Chain-of-Thought from Labeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12822/) (2023)
- [Differentiable Prompt Makes Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13161/) (2021)
- [MultiInstruct: Improving Multi-Modal Zero-Shot Learning via Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10773/) (2022)
- [Text Classification via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08377/) (2023)
- [LFPT5: A Unified Framework for Lifelong Few-shot Language Learning Based on Prompt Tuning of T5](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07298/) (2021)
- [FedPrompt: Communication-Efficient and Privacy Preserving Prompt Tuning in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12268/) (2022)
- [LISA: Layerwise Importance Sampling for Memory-Efficient Large Language Model Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17919/) (2024)
- [PromptCAL: Contrastive Affinity Learning via Auxiliary Prompts for Generalized Novel Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05590/) (2022)
- [Towards Large-scale 3D Representation Learning with Multi-dataset Point Prompt Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09718/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Knowledge Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05994/) (2022)
- [A Unified Evaluation of Textual Backdoor Learning: Frameworks and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08514/) (2022)
- [Template-free Prompt Tuning for Few-shot NER](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13532/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fine-tuned pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved awesome performance on almost all NLP tasks. By using additional prompts to fine-tune PLMs, we can further stimulate the rich knowledge distributed in PLMs to better serve downstream tasks. Prompt tuning has achieved promising results on some few-class classification tasks such as sentiment classification and natural language inference. However, manually designing lots of language prompts is cumbersome and fallible. For those auto-generated prompts, it is also expensive and time-consuming to verify their effectiveness in non-few-shot scenarios. Hence, it is still challenging for prompt tuning to address many-class classification tasks. To this end, we propose prompt tuning with rules (PTR) for many-class text classification and apply logic rules to construct prompts with several sub-prompts. In this way, PTR is able to encode prior knowledge of each class into prompt tuning. We conduct experiments on relation classification, a typical and complicated many-class classification task, and the results show that PTR can significantly and consistently outperform existing state-of-the-art baselines. This indicates that PTR is a promising approach to take advantage of both human prior knowledge and PLMs for those complicated classification tasks.