Abstract. This paper describes the retrieval approaches used by Queen Mary, University of London in the INEX 2006 ad hoc track. In our participation, we mainly investigate element-specific smoothing method within the language modelling framework. We adjust the amount of smoothing required for each XML element depending on its number of topic shifts to provide a focused access to XML elements in the Wikipedia collection. We also investigate whether using non-uniform priors is beneficial for the ad hoc tasks. 