Controlling the text generated by language models and customizing the content
has been a long-standing challenge. Existing prompting techniques proposed in
pursuit of providing control are task-specific and lack generality; this
provides overwhelming choices for non-expert users to find a suitable method
for their task. The effort associated with those techniques, such as in writing
examples, explanations, instructions, etc. further limits their adoption among
non-expert users. In this paper, we propose a simple prompting strategy HELP ME
THINK where we encourage GPT3 to help non-expert users by asking a set of
relevant questions and leveraging user answers to execute the task. We
demonstrate the efficacy of our technique HELP ME THINK on a variety of tasks.
Specifically, we focus on tasks that are hard for average humans and require
significant thinking to perform. We hope our work will encourage the
development of unconventional ways to harness the power of large language
models.Comment: ACL 2023 Finding