Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) systems are being increasingly deployed across all parts of industry and research settings. Developers and end users interact with these systems through the use of prompting or prompt engineering. While prompting is a widespread and highly researched concept, there exists conflicting terminology and a poor ontological understanding of what constitutes a prompt due to the area's nascency. This paper establishes a structured understanding of prompts, by assembling a taxonomy of prompting techniques and analyzing their use. We present a comprehensive vocabulary of 33 vocabulary terms, a taxonomy of 58 text-only prompting techniques, and 40 techniques for other modalities. We further present a meta-analysis of the entire literature on natural language prefix-prompting.

翻译：生成式人工智能系统正日益广泛地部署于工业界与研究领域的各个层面。开发者和终端用户主要通过提示或提示工程与这些系统进行交互。尽管提示已成为一个被广泛研究的概念，但由于该领域尚处于发展初期，目前仍存在术语冲突且对提示的本体论认知尚不清晰。本文通过构建提示技术分类体系并分析其应用，为提示建立了系统化的理解框架。我们提出了包含33个术语的完整词汇表、涵盖58种纯文本提示技术的分类体系，以及40种面向其他模态的提示技术。此外，我们对自然语言前缀提示的相关文献进行了全面元分析。