Positionsweise

Positionsweise is a German term used in technical contexts to describe an operation that is applied per position within a sequence or vector, i.e., position-wise, rather than across the whole data set. The term combines Position and Weise and is frequently encountered in fields such as mathematics, computer science, and linguistics. It is closely related to the English expressions position-wise or element-wise, though regional or disciplinary preferences may vary.

In practice, a positionsweise operation applies the same computation independently to each position. Examples include applying an activation function to every component of a vector, or using a position-wise feed-forward network that processes each sequence position with the same parameters, as in Transformer models. The emphasis is on the per-position nature of the processing rather than on cross-position interactions.

The concept is common in vectorized programming and in descriptions of neural architectures, signal processing, and numerical linear algebra. It contrasts with approaches that aggregate information across positions, such as pooling or sequence-wide statistics. In German-language literature, positionsweise is often translated as per-position, per-element, or element-wise processing.

Because the term may appear primarily in technical contexts, readers encountering positionsweise should look for related terms like element-wise, per-element, or position-wise when consulting multilingual sources.