Prompt Objects¶

Prompts play a crucial role in any language model-based framework and warrant more consideration than mere strings. A well-crafted prompt should include a clear task instruction, articulated in straightforward natural language, comprehensible to any language model. The objective is to compose prompts that are generalizable and do not overly specialize to a specific state of the language model. It’s widely recognized that language models exhibit higher accuracy in few-shot scenarios as opposed to zero-shot contexts. To capitalize on this advantage, it is advisable to accompany each prompt with relevant examples.

Prompts in ragas are defined using the Prompt class. Each prompt defined using this class will contain.

name: a name given to the prompt. Used to save and identify the prompt.
instruction: The natural language description of the task to be carried out by the LLM
examples: List one or more demonstrations of the task at hand. Using demonstrations converts the task from zero-shot to few-shot which can improve accuracy in most cases.
input_keys: List of one or more variable names that are used to identify the inputs provided to the LLM.
output_key: Variable name that is used to identify the output
output_type: Output type of the prompt. Can be JSON or string.
language: the language in which demonstrations are written. The default is English.

Let’s create a simple prompt using Prompt

from ragas.llms.prompt import Prompt

qa_prompt = Prompt(
    name="question_generation",
    instruction="Generate a question for the given answer",
    examples=[
        {
            "answer": "The last Olympics was held in Tokyo, Japan.",
            "context": "The last Olympics was held in Tokyo, Japan. It is held every 4 years",
            "output": {"question":"Where was the last Olympics held?"},
        },
        {
            "answer": "It can change its skin color based on the temperature of its environment.",
            "context": "A recent scientific study has discovered a new species of frog in the Amazon rainforest that has the unique ability to change its skin color based on the temperature of its environment.",
            "output": {"question":"What unique ability does the newly discovered species of frog have?"},
        }
    ],
    input_keys=["answer", "context"],
    output_key="output",
    output_type="json",
)

This will create a Prompt class object with the given instruction, examples, and keys. The output_type is given as JSON here which will process the example values as JSON strings. This object when created will undergo validations to check if the prompt class criteria are met.

instruction is mandatory and cannot be an empty string.
input_keys and output_key are mandatory fields. Multiple input_keys can be used but a single output_key is accepted.
examples are optional but if provided should contain the input_key and output_keys in the example keys. The example values should match the output_type (dict or json or str).

Prompt objects have the following methods that can be used when evaluating or formatting a prompt object.

to_string(self)

This method will generate a prompt string from the given object. This string can be directly used as a formatted string with the metrics in the evaluation task.

print(qa_prompt.to_string())

Generate a question for the given answer

answer: "The last Olympics was held in Tokyo, Japan."
context: "The last Olympics was held in Tokyo, Japan. It is held every 4 years"
output: {{"question": "Where was the last Olympics held?"}}

answer: "It can change its skin color based on the temperature of its environment."
context: "A recent scientific study has discovered a new species of frog in the Amazon rainforest that has the unique ability to change its skin color based on the temperature of its environment."
output: {{"question": "What unique ability does the newly discovered species of frog have?"}}

answer: {answer}
context: {context}
output:

format(self, **kwargs)

This method will use the parameters passed as keyword arguments to format the prompt object and return a Langchain PromptValue object that can be directly used in the evaluation tasks.

qa_prompt.format(answer="This is an answer", context="This is a context")

PromptValue(prompt_str='Generate a question for the given answer\n\nanswer: "The last Olympics was held in Tokyo, Japan."\ncontext: "The last Olympics was held in Tokyo, Japan. It is held every 4 years"\noutput: {"question": "Where was the last Olympics held?"}\n\nanswer: "It can change its skin color based on the temperature of its environment."\ncontext: "A recent scientific study has discovered a new species of frog in the Amazon rainforest that has the unique ability to change its skin color based on the temperature of its environment."\noutput: {"question": "What unique ability does the newly discovered species of frog have?"}\n\nanswer: This is an answer\ncontext: This is a context\noutput: \n')

save(self, cache_dir)

This method will save the prompt to the given cache_dir (default ~/.cache) directory using the value in the name variable.
```
qa_prompt.save()
```
The prompts are saved in JSON format to ~/.cache/ragas by default. One can change this by setting the RAGAS_CACHE_HOME environment variable to the desired path. In this example, the prompt will be saved in ~/.cache/ragas/english/question_generation.json

_load(self, language, name, cache_dir)

This method will load the appropriate prompt from the saved directory.

from ragas.utils import RAGAS_CACHE_HOME
Prompt._load(name="question_generation",language="english",cache_dir=RAGAS_CACHE_HOME)

Prompt(name='question_generation', instruction='Generate a question for the given answer', examples=[{'answer': 'The last Olympics was held in Tokyo, Japan.', 'context': 'The last Olympics was held in Tokyo, Japan. It is held every 4 years', 'output': {'question': 'Where was the last Olympics held?'}}, {'answer': 'It can change its skin color based on the temperature of its environment.', 'context': 'A recent scientific study has discovered a new species of frog in the Amazon rainforest that has the unique ability to change its skin color based on the temperature of its environment.', 'output': {'question': 'What unique ability does the newly discovered species of frog have?'}}], input_keys=['answer', 'context'], output_key='output', output_type='JSON')

The prompt was loaded from .cache/ragas/english/question_generation.json