# PromptPrism: A Linguistically-Inspired Taxonomy for Prompts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12592 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12592/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Model Cards for Model Reporting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03993/) (2018)
- [A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00861/) (2021)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09251/) (2022)
- [DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03714/) (2023)
- [Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11324/) (2023)
- [BBQ: A Hand-Built Bias Benchmark for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08193/) (2021)
- [A Prompt Pattern Catalog to Enhance Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11382/) (2023)
- [Promptbreeder: Self-Referential Self-Improvement Via Prompt Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16797/) (2023)
- [Using cognitive psychology to understand GPT-3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14576/) (2022)
- [RLPrompt: Optimizing Discrete Text Prompts with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12548/) (2022)
- [SmolLM2: When Smol Goes Big -- Data-Centric Training of a Small Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02737/) (2025)
- [XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00333/) (2020)
- [PromptSource: An Integrated Development Environment and Repository for Natural Language Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01279/) (2022)
- [APIGen: Automated Pipeline for Generating Verifiable and Diverse Function-Calling Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18518/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11760/) (2023)
- [Does Prompt Formatting Have Any Impact on LLM Performance?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10541/) (2024)
- [MATH-Perturb: Benchmarking LLMs' Math Reasoning Abilities against Hard Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06453/) (2025)
- [TELeR: A General Taxonomy of LLM Prompts for Benchmarking Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11430/) (2023)
- [Think Twice Before Trusting: Self-Detection for Large Language Models through Comprehensive Answer Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09972/) (2024)
- [CONDAQA: A Contrastive Reading Comprehension Dataset for Reasoning about Negation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00295/) (2022)
- [Symbolic Prompt Program Search: A Structure-Aware Approach to Efficient Compile-Time Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02319/) (2024)
- [From Prompts to Templates: A Systematic Prompt Template Analysis for Real-world LLMapps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02052/) (2025)
- [Structure Guided Prompt: Instructing Large Language Model in Multi-Step Reasoning by Exploring Graph Structure of the Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13415/) (2024)
- [LangGPT: Rethinking Structured Reusable Prompt Design Framework for LLMs from the Programming Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16929/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [BoundRL: Efficient Structured Text Segmentation through Reinforced Boundary Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20151/) (2025)
- [How Do Prompt Variations Affect Energy Consumption in On-Device LLMs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01798/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prompts are the interface for eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Understanding their structure and components is critical for analyzing LLM behavior and optimizing performance. However, the field lacks a comprehensive framework for systematic prompt analysis and understanding. We introduce PromptPrism, a linguistically-inspired taxonomy that enables prompt analysis across three hierarchical levels: functional structure, semantic component, and syntactic pattern. By applying linguistic concepts to prompt analysis, PromptPrism bridges traditional language understanding and modern LLM research, offering insights that purely empirical approaches might miss. We show the practical utility of PromptPrism by applying it to three applications: (1) a taxonomy-guided prompt refinement approach that automatically improves prompt quality and enhances model performance across a range of tasks; (2) a multi-dimensional dataset profiling method that extracts and aggregates structural, semantic, and syntactic characteristics from prompt datasets, enabling comprehensive analysis of prompt distributions and patterns; (3) a controlled experimental framework for prompt sensitivity analysis by quantifying the impact of semantic reordering and delimiter modifications on LLM performance. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of our taxonomy across these applications, demonstrating that PromptPrism provides a foundation for refining, profiling, and analyzing prompts.