Min's IT:U Keynote: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Getting more out of LLM Prompting

Min gave an invited talk at the IT:U Summer School on Natural Language Processing based on Do Xuan Long’s papers over the last three years, based on his papers on prompting.

(26 Jul 2025, Linz, Austria)

What does a famine in Malawi have to do with effective prompting? Like William Kamkwamba’s perseverance in bringing electricity and irrigation to his home, we show how a systematic investigation of prompting mechanisms brings about improved performance across many tasks. This talk describes our work to categorise and structure advice on LLM prompting and investigate how details in prompting can positively impact performance on complex, long generation tasks as well as adherence to output formats. Joint work with NTU and A*STAR, Singapore.

Slides: http://soc-n.us/250726-prompt Video: http://soc-n.us/250726-prompt-yt