# Empirical Study of Co-Renamed Identifiers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.02035 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02035/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [SCALAR: A Part-of-speech Tagger for Identifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17038/) (2025)
- [Multi-Agent Coordinated Rename Refactoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00482/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Background: The renaming of program identifiers is the most common refactoring operation. Because some identifiers are related to each other, developers may need to rename related identifiers together. Aims: To understand how developers rename multiple identifiers simultaneously, it is necessary to consider the relationships between identifiers in the program and the brief matching for non-identical but semantically similar identifiers. Method: We investigate the relationships between co-renamed identifiers and identify the types of their relationships that contribute to improving the recommendation using more than 1M of renaming instances collected from the histories of open-source software projects. We also evaluate and compare the impact of co-renaming and the relationships between identifiers when inflections occur in the words in identifiers are taken into account. Results: We revealed several relationships of identifiers that are frequently found in the co-renamed identifiers, such as the identifiers of methods in the same class or an identifier defining a variable and another used for initializing the variable, depending on the type of the renamed identifiers. Additionally, the consideration of inflections did not affect the tendency of the relationships. Conclusion: These results suggest an approach that prioritizes the identifiers to be recommended depending on their types and the type of the renamed identifier.