General Terms

XML retrieval, a very active branch of IR, studies the fo-cused retrieval of semi-structured data. Although much progress has been made, especially through the annual INi-tiative for the Evaluation of XML retrieval (INEX), very lit-tle is known about XML element retrieval in action: What do users expect from an element retrieval system? What kind of information needs do they have? What sort of re-sults do they request? Etc. In an effort to recover some of the answers, an extensive questionnaire was part of the peer topic creation process at INEX 2006. In this paper we present an analysis of the responses of topic authors. Our main general finding is that there is a great variety in the re-sponses, and hence in the expectations about XML element retrieval