A new tagging method is presented to build a Chinese semantic corpus. The method characterizes the sentence meaning as a linear sequence of dependency relationships which are the semantic or syntactic relationships between words in the sentence. This representation method is used to build a Chinese statistical parser model to understand the sentence meaning. Specific experiments on automatic telephone switchboard conversations show that the proposed parser has a precision of 80%. This work provides a foundation for building a large-scale Chinese semantic corpus and for research on understanding modeling of the Chinese language.