Meta Task Prompting Elicits Embeddings from Large Language Models

Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Publication Type:
Conference Proceeding
Citation:
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2024, 1, pp. 10141-10157
Issue Date:
2024-01-01
Full metadata record
We introduce a new unsupervised text embedding method, Meta-Task Prompting with Explicit One-Word Limitation (MetaEOL), for generating high-quality sentence embeddings from Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for model fine-tuning. Leveraging meta-task prompting, MetaEOL guides LLMs to produce embeddings through a series of carefully designed prompts that address multiple representational aspects. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that embeddings averaged from various meta-tasks are versatile embeddings that yield competitive performance on Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmarks and excel in downstream tasks, surpassing contrastive-trained models. Our findings suggest a new scaling law, offering a versatile and resource-efficient approach for embedding generation across diverse scenarios.
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