# Decomposed Prompting to Answer Questions on a Course Discussion Board

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.21170 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21170/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 8 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Decomposed Prompting: A Modular Approach for Solving Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02406/) (2022)
- [Automatic Generation of Programming Exercises and Code Explanations using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11861/) (2022)
- [A Neural Network Solves, Explains, and Generates University Math Problems by Program Synthesis and Few-Shot Learning at Human Level](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15594/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose and evaluate a question-answering system that uses decomposed prompting to classify and answer student questions on a course discussion board. Our system uses a large language model (LLM) to classify questions into one of four types: conceptual, homework, logistics, and not answerable. This enables us to employ a different strategy for answering questions that fall under different types. Using a variant of GPT-3, we achieve 81% classification accuracy. We discuss our system's performance on answering conceptual questions from a machine learning course and various failure modes.