Let C be an arithmetic circuit of poly(n) size given as input that computes a polynomial f ∈ F[X], where X = {x1, x2, . . . , xn} and F is any field where the field arithmetic can be performed efficiently. We obtain new algorithms for the following two problems first studied by Koutis and Williams [13,22,14].(k,n)-MLC: Compute the sum of the coefficients of all degree-k multilinear monomials in the polynomial f . k-MMD: Test if there is a nonzero degree-k multilinear monomial in the polynomial f . Our algorithms are based on the fact that the Hadamard product f • S n,k , is the degree-k multilinear part of f , where S n,k is the k th elementary symmetric polynomial. For (k,n)-MLC problem, we give a deterministic algorithm of run time O * (n k/2+c log k ) (where c is a constant), answering an open question of Koutis and Williams [14, ICALP'09]. As corollaries, we show O * ( n ↓k/2