This research is aimed at creating and presenting DisKnow, a data extraction system with the capability of filtering and abstracting tweets, to improve community resilience and decision-making in disaster scenarios. Nowadays most people act as human sensors, exposing detailed information regarding occurring disasters, in social media. Through a pipeline of natural language processing (NLP) tools for text processing, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for classifying and extracting disasters, and knowledge graphs (KG) for presenting connected insights, it is possible to generate real-time visual information about such disasters and affected stakeholders, to better the crisis management process, by disseminating such information to both relevant authorities and population alike. DisKnow has proved to be on par with the state-of-the-art Disaster Extraction systems, and it contributes with a way to easily manage and present such happenings.

The process of protecting sensitive data is continually growing and becoming increasingly important, especially as a result of the directives and laws imposed by the European Union. The effort to create automatic systems is continuous, but, in most cases, the processes behind them are still manual or semi-automatic. In this work, we have developed a component that can extract and classify sensitive data, from unstructured text information in European Portuguese. The objective was to create a system that allows organizations to understand their data and comply with legal and security purposes. We studied a hybrid approach to the problem of Named Entity Recognition for the Portuguese language. This approach combines several techniques such as rule-based/lexical-based models, machine learning algorithms, and neural networks. The rule-based and lexical-based approaches were used only for a set of specific classes. For the remaining classes of entities, two statistical models were tested—Conditional Random Fields and Random Forest and, finally, a Bidirectional-LSTM approach as experimented. Regarding the statistical models, we realized that Conditional Random Fields is the one that can obtain the best results, with a f1-score of 65.50%. With the Bi-LSTM approach, we have achieved a result of 83.01%. The corpora used for training and testing were HAREM Golden Collection, SIGARRA News Corpus, and DataSense NER Corpus.