Relation extraction is to extract the semantic relation between entity pairs in text, and it is a key point in building Knowledge Graphs and information extraction. The rapid development of deep learning in recent years has resulted in rich research results in relation extraction tasks. At present, the accuracy of relation extraction tasks based on pre-trained language models such as BERT exceeds the methods based on Convolutional or Recurrent Neural Networks. This review mainly summarizes the research progress of pre-trained language models such as BERT in supervised learning and distant supervision relation extraction. In addition, the directions for future research and some comparisons and analyses are discussed in our whole survey. The survey may help readers understand and catch some key techniques about the issue, and identify some future research directions.