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

While psycholinguistic research has repeatedly shown that generic masculines in German come with a masculine 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 one 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 psycholinguistic studies.