Abstract Current studies on action detection in untrimmed videos are mostly designed for action classes, where an action is described at word level such as jumping, tumbling, swing, etc. This paper focuses on a rarely investigated problem of localizing an activity via a sentence query which would be more challenging and practical. Considering that current methods are generally time-consuming due to the dense frame-processing manner, we propose a recurrent neural network based reinforcement learning model which selectively observes a sequence of frames and associates the given sentence with video content in a matching-based manner. However, directly matching sentences with video content performs poorly due to the large visual-semantic discrepancy. Thus, we extend the method to a semantic matching reinforcement learning (SM-RL) model by extracting semantic concepts of videos and then fusing them with global context features. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, TACoS, Charades-STA and DiDeMo, show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance with a high detection speed, demonstrating both effectiveness and effificiency of our method