langchain/templates/stepback-qa-prompting/README.md

# Step-Back Prompting (Question-Answering)

One prompting technique called "Step-Back" prompting can improve performance on complex questions by first asking a "step back" question. This can be combined with regular question-answering applications by then doing retrieval on both the original and step-back question.

Read the paper [here](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06117)

See an excelent blog post on this by Cobus Greyling [here](https://cobusgreyling.medium.com/a-new-prompt-engineering-technique-has-been-introduced-called-step-back-prompting-b00e8954cacb)

In this template we will replicate this technique. We modify the prompts used slightly to work better with chat models.
Templates (#12294) Co-authored-by: Harrison Chase <hw.chase.17@gmail.com> Co-authored-by: Lance Martin <lance@langchain.dev> Co-authored-by: Jacob Lee <jacoblee93@gmail.com> 11 months ago			`# Step-Back Prompting (Question-Answering)`

			`One prompting technique called "Step-Back" prompting can improve performance on complex questions by first asking a "step back" question. This can be combined with regular question-answering applications by then doing retrieval on both the original and step-back question.`

			`Read the paper [here](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06117)`

			`See an excelent blog post on this by Cobus Greyling [here](https://cobusgreyling.medium.com/a-new-prompt-engineering-technique-has-been-introduced-called-step-back-prompting-b00e8954cacb)`

			`In this template we will replicate this technique. We modify the prompts used slightly to work better with chat models.`