A Call for Consistency in Reporting Typological Diversity

In order to draw generalizable conclusions about the performance of multilingual models across languages, it is important to evaluate on a set of languages that captures linguistic diversity.Linguistic typology is increasingly used to justify language selection, inspired by language sampling in linguistics. However, justifications for ‘typological diversity’ exhibit great variation, as there seems to be no set definition, methodology or consistent link to linguistic typology.In this work, we provide a systematic insight into how previous work in the ACL Anthology uses the term ‘typological diversity’.Our two main findings are: 1) what is meant by typologically diverse language selection is not consistent and 2) the actual typological diversity of the language sets in these papers varies greatly.We argue that, when making claims about ‘typological diversity’, an operationalization of this should be included.A systematic approach that quantifies this claim, also with respect to the number of languages used, would be even better.