In this work the contribution of automatically-extracted (thus, imperfect) video structural semantics towards improving interactive video retrieval is examined. First, the automatic extraction of video structural semantics, i.e. the decomposition of the video into scenes that correspond to the different sub-stories or high-level events, is performed. Then, these are introduced to the interactive video retrieval paradigm. Finally, their potential contribution is experimentally evaluated. To this end, different members of a family of scene segmentation algorithms are applied to an extensive professional video collection coming from the TRECVID benchmarking activity, subsequently, a large number of user interactions with a retrieval system that exploits these structural semantics is simulated. The experimental results document the contribution of state-of-the-art automatically-extracted video structural semantics to the efficient and effective interactive video retrieval.