# Identifying Concurrency Bug Reports via Linguistic Patterns

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16338 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16338/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jan 2026.

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

- [PopPy: Opportunistically Exploiting Parallelism in Python Agentic Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18697/) (2026)
- [ConFL: Explainable Concurrent Fault Localization via Hierarchy-Guided LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02974/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the growing ubiquity of multi-core architectures, concurrent systems have become essential but increasingly prone to complex issues such as data races and deadlocks. While modern issue-tracking systems facilitate the reporting of such problems, labeling concurrency-related bug reports remains a labor-intensive and error-prone task. This paper presents a linguistic-pattern-based framework for automatically identifying concurrency bug reports. We derive 58 distinct linguistic patterns from 730 manually labeled concurrency bug reports, organized across four levels: word-level (keywords), phrase-level (n-grams), sentence-level (semantic), and bug report-level (contextual). To assess their effectiveness, we evaluate four complementary approaches-matching, learning, prompt-based, and fine-tuning-spanning traditional machine learning, large language models (LLMs), and pre-trained language models (PLMs). Our comprehensive evaluation on 12 large-scale open-source projects (10,920 issue reports from GitHub and Jira) demonstrates that fine-tuning PLMs with linguistic-pattern-enriched inputs achieves the best performance, reaching a precision of 91% on GitHub and 93% on Jira, and maintaining strong precision on post cut-off data (91%). The contributions of this work include: (1) a comprehensive taxonomy of linguistic patterns for concurrency bugs, (2) a novel fine-tuning strategy that integrates domain-specific linguistic knowledge into PLMs, and (3) a curated, labeled dataset to support reproducible research. Together, these advances provide a foundation for improving the automation, precision, and interpretability of concurrency bug classification.