  In this paper we analyze the efficiency of various search results
diversification methods. While efficacy of diversification approaches has been
deeply investigated in the past, response time and scalability issues have been
rarely addressed. A unified framework for studying performance and feasibility
of result diversification solutions is thus proposed. First we define a new
methodology for detecting when, and how, query results need to be diversified.
To this purpose, we rely on the concept of "query refinement" to estimate the
probability of a query to be ambiguous. Then, relying on this novel ambiguity
detection method, we deploy and compare on a standard test set, three different
diversification methods: IASelect, xQuAD, and OptSelect. While the first two
are recent state-of-the-art proposals, the latter is an original algorithm
introduced in this paper. We evaluate both the efficiency and the effectiveness
of our approach against its competitors by using the standard TREC Web
diversification track testbed. Results shown that OptSelect is able to run two
orders of magnitude faster than the two other state-of-the-art approaches and
to obtain comparable figures in diversification effectiveness.
