@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2023-exploring,
    title = "Exploring the Curious Case of Code Prompts",
    author = "Zhang, Li  and
      Dugan, Liam  and
      Xu, Hainiu  and
      Callison-burch, Chris",
    editor = "Dalvi Mishra, Bhavana  and
      Durrett, Greg  and
      Jansen, Peter  and
      Neves Ribeiro, Danilo  and
      Wei, Jason",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Reasoning and Structured Explanations (NLRSE)",
    month = jun,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlrse-1.2",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.nlrse-1.2",
    pages = "9--17",
    abstract = "Recent work has shown that prompting language models with code-like representations of natural language leads to performance improvements on structured reasoning tasks. However, such tasks comprise only a small subset of all natural language tasks. In our work, we seek to answer whether or not code-prompting is the preferred way of interacting with language models in general. We compare code and text prompts across three popular GPT models (davinci, code-davinci-002, and text-davinci-002) on a broader selection of tasks (e.g., QA, sentiment, summarization) and find that with few exceptions, code prompts do not consistently outperform text prompts. Furthermore, we show that the style of code prompt has a large effect on performance for some (but not all) tasks and that fine-tuning on text instructions leads to better relative performance of code prompts.",
}

Recent work has shown that prompting language models with code-like representations of natural language leads to performance improvements on structured reasoning tasks. However, such tasks comprise only a small subset of all natural language tasks. In our work, we seek to answer whether or not code-prompting is the preferred way of interacting with language models in general. We compare code and text prompts across three popular GPT models (davinci, code-davinci-002, and text-davinci-002) on a broader selection of tasks (e.g., QA, sentiment, summarization) and find that with few exceptions, code prompts do not consistently outperform text prompts. Furthermore, we show that the style of code prompt has a large effect on performance for some (but not all) tasks and that fine-tuning on text instructions leads to better relative performance of code prompts.
Zhang, Li Dugan, Liam Xu, Hainiu Callison-burch, Chris
Exploring the Curious Case of Code Prompts