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[Submitted on 13 Sep 2026] Title:POSPAN: Position-Constrained Span Masking for Language Model Pre-training View a PDF of the paper titled POSPAN: Position-Constrained Span Masking for Language Model Pre-training, by Zhenyu Zhang and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Span-level masked language modeling (MLM) has shown to be advantageous to pre-trained language models over the original single-token MLM, as entities/phrases and their dependencies are critical to language understanding. Previous works only consider span length with some discrete distributions, while the dependencies among spans are ignored, i.e., assuming that the positions of masked spans are uniformly distributed. In this paper, we present POSPAN, a general framework to allow diverse position-constrained span masking strategies via the combination of span length distribution and position constraint distribution, which unifies all existing span-level masking methods. To verify the effectiveness of POSPAN in pre-training, we evaluate it on the datasets from several NLU benchmarks. Experimental results indicate that the position constraint is capable of enhancing span-level masking broadly, and our best POSPAN setting consistently outperforms its span-length-only counterparts and vanilla MLM. We also conduct theoretical analysis for the position constraint in masked language models to shed light on the reason why POSPAN works well, demonstrating the rationality and necessity of POSPAN. Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2609.16061 [cs.LG] (or arXiv:2609.16061v1 [cs.LG] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.16061 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Journal reference: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2023 Submission history From: Zhenyu Zhang [view email] [v1] Sun, 13 Sep 2026 09:49:33 UTC (111 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled POSPAN: Position-Constrained Span Masking for Language Model Pre-training, by Zhenyu Zhang and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.LG new | recent | 2026-09 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI cs.CL References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Loading... Data provided by: Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) IArxiv recommender toggle IArxiv Recommender (What is IArxiv?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)