<p>I think something like <a href="https://github.com/shangjingbo1226/AutoNER" rel="nofollow noreferrer">AutoNER</a> might be useful for this. Essentially, the input to the system is text documents from a particular domain and a list of domain-specific entities that you'd like the system to recognize (like Hockey players in your case). </p>

<p>According to their results in <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.03599.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this paper</a>, they perform well on recognizing chemical names and disease names among others.</p>
ML based domain specific named enitty recognition (NER)?
<p>I need to build a classifier which identifies NEs in a specific domain. So for instance if my domain is Hockey or Football, the classifier should go accept NEs in that domain but NOT all pronouns it sees on web pages. My ultimate goal is to improve text classification through NER. </p>

<p>For people working in this area please suggest me how should I build such a classifier?
thanks!</p>