Text chunking is a very relevant Natural Language Processing task, and consists in dividing a sentence into disjoint sequences of syntactically correlated words. One of the factors that highly contribute to its importance is that its results are used as a significant input to more complex linguistic problems. Among those problems we have full parsing, clause identification, dependency parsing, semantic role labeling and machine translation. In particular, Machine Learning approaches to these tasks greatly benefit from the use of a chunk feature. A respectable number of effective chunk extraction strategies for the English language has been presented during the last few years. However, as far as we know, no comprehensive study has been done on text chunking for Portuguese, showing its benefits. The scope of this work is the Portuguese language, and its objective is twofold. First, we analyze the impact of different chunk definitions, using a heuristic to generate chunks that relies on previous full parsing annotation. Then, we propose Machine Learning models for chunk extraction based on the Entropy Guided Transformation Learning technique. We employ the Bosque corpus, from the Floresta Sintá(c)tica project, for our experiments. Using golden values determined by our heuristic, a chunk feature improves the F beta equal 1 score of a clause identification system for Portuguese by 6.85 and the accuracy of a dependency parsing system by 1.54. Moreover, our best chunk extractor achieves a F beta equal 1 of 87.95 when automatic part-of-speech tags are applied. The empirical findings indicate that, indeed, chunk information derived by our heuristic is relevant to more elaborate tasks targeted on Portuguese. Furthermore, the effectiveness of our extractors is comparable to the state-of-the-art similars for English, taking into account that our proposed models are reasonably simple.