# iREL at SemEval-2024 Task 9: Improving Conventional Prompting Methods for Brain Teasers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16129 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16129/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [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)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Can Generalist Foundation Models Outcompete Special-Purpose Tuning? Case Study in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16452/) (2023)
- [LatEval: An Interactive LLMs Evaluation Benchmark with Incomplete Information from Lateral Thinking Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10855/) (2023)
- [SemEval-2024 Task 9: BRAINTEASER: A Novel Task Defying Common Sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16068/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper describes our approach for SemEval-2024 Task 9: BRAINTEASER: A Novel Task Defying Common Sense. The BRAINTEASER task comprises multiple-choice Question Answering designed to evaluate the models' lateral thinking capabilities. It consists of Sentence Puzzle and Word Puzzle subtasks that require models to defy default common-sense associations and exhibit unconventional thinking. We propose a unique strategy to improve the performance of pre-trained language models, notably the Gemini 1.0 Pro Model, in both subtasks. We employ static and dynamic few-shot prompting techniques and introduce a model-generated reasoning strategy that utilizes the LLM's reasoning capabilities to improve performance. Our approach demonstrated significant improvements, showing that it performed better than the baseline models by a considerable margin but fell short of performing as well as the human annotators, thus highlighting the efficacy of the proposed strategies.