Ranking in information retrieval has been traditionally approached as a pursuit of relevant information, under the assumption that the users’ information needs are unambiguously conveyed by their submitted queries. Nevertheless, as an inherently limited representation of a more complex information need, every query can arguably be considered ambiguous to some extent. In order to tackle query ambiguity, search result diversification approaches have recently been proposed to produce rankings aimed to satisfy the multiple possible information needs underlying a query. In this survey, we review the published literature on search result diversification. In particular, we discuss the motivations for diversifying the search results for an ambiguous query and provide a formal definition of the search result diversification problem. In addition, we describe the most successful approaches in the literature for producing and evaluating diversity in multiple search domains. Finally, we also discuss recent advances as well as open research directions in the field of search result diversification.

在假定用户的信息需求由他们提交的查询明确传达的假设下，信息检索中的排名通常被视为对相关信息的追求。然而，作为对更复杂信息需求的固有限制表示，每个查询在某种程度上可以被认为是模棱两可的。为了解决查询歧义，最近已经提出了搜索结果多样化方法来产生旨在满足查询潜在的多种可能信息需求的排名。在这项调查中，我们回顾了有关搜索结果多样化的已发表文献。特别是，我们讨论了歧义查询的搜索结果多样化的动机，并提供了搜索结果多样化问题的正式定义。此外，我们在文献中描述了在多个搜索领域中产生和评估多样性的最成功方法。最后，我们还讨论了搜索结果多样化领域中的最新进展以及开放的研究方向。