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We investigate the impact of politeness levels in prompts on the performance of large language models (LLMs). Polite language in human communications often garners more compliance and effectiveness, while rudeness can cause aversion,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Ziqi Yin , Hao Wang , Kaito Horio , Daisuke Kawahara , Satoshi Sekine

Prompt engineering has emerged as a critical factor influencing large language model (LLM) performance, yet the impact of pragmatic elements such as linguistic tone and politeness remains underexplored, particularly across different model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Hanyu Cai , Binqi Shen , Lier Jin , Lan Hu , Xiaojing Fan

This paper explores the response of Large Language Models (LLMs) to user prompts with different degrees of politeness and impoliteness. The Politeness Theory by Brown and Levinson and the Impoliteness Framework by Culpeper form the basis of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Hitesh Mehta , Arjit Saxena , Garima Chhikara , Rohit Kumar

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) is proliferating, yet their performance is observed to vary based on prompting styles and tones. In this study, we investigate both whether and how tonal variations in prompts lead to disparate LLM…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Om Dobariya , Akhil Kumar

The versatility of Large Language Models (LLMs) on natural language understanding tasks has made them popular for research in social sciences. To properly understand the properties and innate personas of LLMs, researchers have performed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Bangzhao Shu , Lechen Zhang , Minje Choi , Lavinia Dunagan , Lajanugen Logeswaran , Moontae Lee , Dallas Card , David Jurgens

Polite speech poses a fundamental alignment challenge for large language models (LLMs). Humans deploy a rich repertoire of linguistic strategies to balance informational and social goals -- from positive approaches that build rapport…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Haoran Zhao , Robert D. Hawkins

Prompt design plays a critical role in the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), yet the impact of prompt specificity - how detailed or vague a prompt is - remains understudied. This paper introduces DETAIL, a framework for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Olivia Kim

The latest generation of LLMs can be prompted to achieve impressive zero-shot or few-shot performance in many NLP tasks. However, since performance is highly sensitive to the choice of prompts, considerable effort has been devoted to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Alina Leidinger , Robert van Rooij , Ekaterina Shutova

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved top results in recent machine translation evaluations, but they are also known to be sensitive to errors and perturbations in their prompts. We systematically evaluate how both humanly plausible…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Patrícia Schmidtová , Niyati Bafna , Seth Aycock , Gianluca Vico , Wiktor Kamzela , Katharina Hämmerl , Vilém Zouhar

This study investigates whether repeating questions within prompts influences the performance of large language models (LLMs). We hypothesize that reiterating a question within a single prompt might enhance the model's focus on key elements…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Sagi Shaier , Mario Sanz-Guerrero , Katharina von der Wense

This is the first of a series of short reports that seek to help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working with AI through rigorous testing. In this report, we demonstrate two things: - There is no…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Lennart Meincke , Ethan Mollick , Lilach Mollick , Dan Shapiro

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has notably transformed numerous sectors, offering impressive text generation capabilities. Yet, the reliability and truthfulness of these models remain pressing concerns. To this end, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Satyapriya Krishna , Chirag Agarwal , Himabindu Lakkaraju

This paper investigates the influence of cognitive biases on Large Language Models (LLMs) outputs. Cognitive biases, such as confirmation and availability biases, can distort user inputs through prompts, potentially leading to unfaithful…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Yan Sun , Stanley Kok

Recent work has explored the use of large language models (LLMs) to generate tutoring responses in mathematics, yet it remains unclear how closely their instructional behavior aligns with expert human practice. We analyze a dataset of math…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Ramatu Oiza Abdulsalam , Segun Aroyehun

The performance of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) is often sensitive to nuances in prompt templates, requiring careful prompt engineering, adding costs in terms of computing and human effort. In this study, we present experiments…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Liang Cheng , Tianyi LI , Zhaowei Wang , Mark Steedman

Large Language Models (LLMs), though shown to be effective in many applications, can vary significantly in their response quality. In this paper, we investigate this problem of prompt fairness: specifically, the phrasing of a prompt by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Meiyu Zhong , Noel Teku , Ravi Tandon

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), yet the influence of prompt sentiment, a latent affective characteristic of input text, remains underexplored. This study systematically examines…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Vishal Gandhi , Sagar Gandhi

Large Language Models like GPT-4 adjust their responses not only based on the question asked, but also on how it is emotionally phrased. We systematically vary the emotional tone of 156 prompts - spanning controversial and everyday topics -…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Franck Bardol

Politeness is a core dimension of human communication, yet its role in human-AI information seeking remains underexplored. We investigate how user politeness behaviour shapes conversational outcomes in a cooking-assistance setting. First,…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-01-16 David Elsweiler , Christine Elsweiler , Anna Ziegner

Large language models (LLMs) can perform recommendation tasks by taking prompts written in natural language as input. Compared to traditional methods such as collaborative filtering, LLM-based recommendation offers advantages in handling…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Genki Kusano , Kosuke Akimoto , Kunihiro Takeoka
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