Instances of bias: the gendered semantics of generic masculines in German revealed by instance vectors

Abstract

While research using behavioural methods has repeatedly shown that generic masculines in German come with a male bias, computational methods only entered this area of research very recently. The present paper shows that some assumptions made by these recent computational studies – treating genericity as an inflectional function and computing a vector for generic usage strongly correlated with the grammatical masculine – are not without issue, and offers the use of semantic instance vectors as a possible solution to these issues. Beyond this methodological improvement, the present paper finds that generic masculines are indeed semantically more similar to specific masculines than to specific feminines – results that are in line with findings by the recent computational studies and the majority of previous behavioural studies.

Keywords

• distributional semantics
• gender bias
• generic masculine
• german