jMWE is a Java library for constructing and testing Multi-Word Expression detectors. A Multi-Word Expression (MWE) is a group of words that (1) occurs together more often than would be expected by pure chance and, (2) is arbitrarily restricted with regard to their syntactic or semantic flexibility. Examples of common MWEs are compound nouns such as world record or verb-particle constructions such as look up, as, for example in the sentence:
  1. She looked up the world record.
The library has three main facilities: (1) a detector API, (2) a MWE index facility, and (3) a test harness. The detector API defines a detector interface which provides a single method for detecting MWE tokens in a list of individual tokens; anyone interested in taking advantage of jMWEs testing infrastructure or writing their own MWE token detection algorithm need only implement this interface. jMWE provides several baseline MWE token detection strategies. Also provided are detector filters and resolvers, which apply a specific constraint to or resolve conflicts in the output another detector. The MWE index provides classes for constructing, storing, and accessing indices of valid MWE types. An MWE index allows an algorithm to retrieve a list of MWE types given a single word token and part of speech. The index also lists how frequently, in a particular concordance, a set of tokens appears as a particular MWE type rather than as independent words. The test harness allows one to run an MWE detector over a given corpus and measure its precision and recall. The library has no GUI elements.

jMWE is free to use for all purposes, as long as proper acknowledgment is made. Details can be found in the license, which is included with the distribution.