Animacy detection is a problem whose solution has been shown to be beneficial for a number of syntactic and semantic tasks.We present a state-of-the-art system for this task which uses a number of simple classifiers with heterogeneous data sources in a voting scheme.We show how this framework can give us direct insight into the behavior of the system, allowing us to more easily diagnose sources of error.

Digital storage of personal music collections and cloud-based music services (e.g. Pandora, Spotify) have fundamentally changed how music is consumed. In particular, automatically generated playlists have become an important mode of accessing large music collections. The key goal of automated playlist generation is to provide the user with a coherent listening experience. In this paper, we present Latent Markov Embedding (LME), a machine learning algorithm for generating such playlists. In analogy to matrix factorization methods for collaborative filtering, the algorithm does not require songs to be described by features a priori, but it learns a representation from example playlists. We formulate this problem as a regularized maximum-likelihood embedding of Markov chains in Euclidian space, and show how the resulting optimization problem can be solved efficiently. An empirical evaluation shows that the LME is substantially more accurate than adaptations of smoothed n-gram models commonly used in natural language processing.

Minwise hashing is a standard technique in the context of search for efficiently computing set similarities. The recent development of b-bit minwise hashing provides a substantial improvement by storing only the lowest b bits of each hashed value. In this paper, we demonstrate that b-bit minwise hashing can be naturally integrated with linear learning algorithms such as linear SVM and logistic regression, to solve large-scale and high-dimensional statistical learning tasks, especially when the data do not fit in memory. We compare $b$-bit minwise hashing with the Count-Min (CM) and Vowpal Wabbit (VW) algorithms, which have essentially the same variances as random projections. Our theoretical and empirical comparisons illustrate that b-bit minwise hashing is significantly more accurate (at the same storage cost) than VW (and random projections) for binary data.