%0 Conference Proceedings %T Local Structure Matters Most in Most Languages %A Clouatre, Louis %A Parthasarathi, Prasanna %A Zouaq, Amal %A Chandar, Sarath %Y He, Yulan %Y Ji, Heng %Y Li, Sujian %Y Liu, Yang %Y Chang, Chua-Hui %S Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers) %D 2022 %8 November %I Association for Computational Linguistics %C Online only %F clouatre-etal-2022-local-structure %X Many recent perturbation studies have found unintuitive results on what does and does not matter when performing Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks in English. Coding properties, such as the order of words, can often be removed through shuffling without impacting downstream performances. Such insight may be used to direct future research into English NLP models. As many improvements in multilingual settings consist of wholesale adaptation of English approaches, it is important to verify whether those studies replicate or not in multilingual settings. In this work, we replicate a study on the importance of local structure, and the relative unimportance of global structure, in a multilingual setting. We find that the phenomenon observed on the English language broadly translates to over 120 languages, with a few caveats. %U https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.35 %P 285-294