Semantic processing is a key challenge in natural language processing. Abstract meaning representation (AMR) is a novel framework of representing the meaning of a sentence. Instead of a tree, it abstracts the meaning of a sentence into a rooted acyclic directed graph, which solves the argument sharing problem. Thus, the corpus construction and automated parsing of AMR become a heated research field. This paper introduces the AMR's basic concept, annotation guidelines, parsing algorithm and applications. Then we discuss the problems and shortcomings of the parsing algorithms by comparison experiments. We also introduce the development of Chinese AMR researches. At last, we discuss the potentials of AMR, which are fruitful for Chinese semantic processing.