Embodiments of the present disclosure disclose a method and apparatus for determining a topic. A specific embodiment of the method comprises: determining a to-be-recognized sentence sequence; calculating similarities between the to-be-recognized sentence sequence and each of topic templates in a topic template set in a target area, the each of the topic templates in the topic template set corresponding to a topic in at least one topic in the target area, the topic template including a topic section sequence, and a topic section including a topic sentence sequence; and determining a topic of the to-be-recognized sentence sequence according to an associated parameter, the associated parameter including the similarities between the to-be-recognized sentence sequence and the each of the topic templates in the topic template set. This embodiment reduces labor costs during a topic segmentation.