With rapidly evolving technologies and emerging tools, sports-related videos generated online are rapidly increasing. To automate the sports video editing/highlight generation process, a key task is to precisely recognize and locate events-of-interest in videos. Embodiments herein comprise a two-stage paradigm to detect categories of events and when these events happen in videos. In one or more embodiments, multiple action recognition models extract high-level semantic features, and a transformer-based temporal detection module locates target events. These novel approaches achieved state-of-the-art performance in both action spotting and replay grounding. While presented in the context of sports, it shall be noted that the systems and methods herein may be used for videos comprising other content and events.