XML information retrieval (XML-IR) systems aim to provide users with relevant results that are more speci c than documents. To interact with XML-IR systems, users must express both their content and structural requirements in the form of a structured query, using formal languages such as XPath or NEXI. Natural language queries (NLQs) are a more intuitive alternative. Here, we present three approaches that analyse NLQs and translate them into a formal language (NEXI) query. The approaches participated in INEX's 2005 NLP track, where they performed strongly, even outperforming a baseline that consisted of manually constructed NEXI expressions. This suggests that further collaboration between NLP and XML-IR could be mutually bene cial.