In this paper, we dedicate to the topic of aspect ranking, which aims to automatically identify important product aspects from online consumer reviews. The important aspects are identified according to two observations: (a) the important aspects of a product are usually commented by a large number of consumers; and (b) consumers ’ opinions on the important aspects greatly influence their overall opinions on the product. In particular, given consumer reviews of a product, we first identify the product aspects by a shallow dependency parser and determine consumers ’ opinions on these aspects via a sentiment classifier. We then develop an aspect ranking algorithm to identify the important aspects by simultaneously considering the aspect frequency and the influence of consumers ’ opinions given to each aspect on their overall opinions. The experimental results on 11 popular products in four domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We further apply the aspect ranking results to the application of documentlevel sentiment classification, and improve the performance significantly. 1

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