In modern software development, Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) are essential
to satisfy users’ needs, which define various constraints and qualities that the system must adhere
(e.g., quality, usability, security). Since NFR play a critical role in the guidance of architectural de-
sign, it is important to extract different NFR from software requirements specification documents
early and accurately. However, distinguishing different categories of NFR is tedious, error-prone,
and time-consuming due to the complexity of software systems. In our paper, we conducted a
comprehensive study to evaluate the performance of prompt-based non-functional requirements
classification by designing various handcraft templates and soft templates on the pre-trained lan-
guage model (i.e., BERT). Our experimental results show that handcraft templates can achieve
best effectiveness (e.g., 83.52% in terms of F1 score) but with unstable performance for different
templates. Also, the performance can become stable after soft templates are concatenated with
handcraft templates. For example, the standard deviation of F1 score for four combined templates
can be improved to 0.74 from 1.00 for handcraft templates.