Sentence creation using a word list - Problem getting GPT4 to stick to the criteria

Prompting
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This is an example prompt that is not working (gpt4), I’ve tried many variations:

“Below is a Spanish vocabulary list. I’d like you to create 10 Spanish sentences. The theme is not important, but the sentences must be coherent. You must only use the words provided, this is the number 1 priority. Each sentence must have at least 2 clauses. Here are a couple of examples:
" Voy a darle una invitación, es algo importante.”
“Tengo que comprarle algo para la casa.”
Here is the word list …"

The gpt response always fails to stick to the word list. It is a long word list, from which hundreds of coherent sentences can be made. I am aware this is something openai struggles with, but I wondered if there is a type of prompt that can help.
Thanks

2

There is a fairly easy test you can perform to tell if the AI will produce a good result or not.

Could you do the task after reading the list of words you have not seen before, just once, and then write the sentence?

You can generalise this to any task, given a collection of information could you perform the task if you only look at the information once, if the answer is yes, great, if not, the AI will also usually struggle without tools.

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That’s very interesting, thanks. So I’m guessing it would be better if I asked for one sentence at a time, which is pretty much what I could do myself and would eliminate the convenience of using AI. Any work around suggestions? Thanks

4

Experimentation!, this field of computation is totally new, there are no textbooks to look things up on, we are the ones writing them. Try with 3 or 4 at once, see how that goes, I mean, yes you could do that, probably, but there remains the fact that a machine is now doing it that does not need sleep or food or gets ill or needs time off… so you are up compared to a person doing it.

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5

One thing to keep in mind: GPT-4 is fine-tuned as a chat agent—not as an instruct agent. It “wants” to be verbose and talk about things. It will be very difficult to get it to only use words in a word list.

One avenue you might try is to prompt it with few-shot learning examples.

Basically, give it a couple of sample word lists and sample sentences made using only words from those word lists.

I would try two examples to start.

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6

Got it, that makes sense, I hadn’t thought of it like that. Thanks