NurseLLM: The First Specialized Language Model for Nursing

Md Tawkat Islam Khondaker, Julia Harrington, Shady Shehata


Abstract
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly transformed medical systems. However, their potential within specialized domains such as nursing remains largely underexplored. In this work, we introduce NurseLLM, the first nursing-specialized LLM tailored for multiple choice question-answering (MCQ) tasks. We develop a multi-stage data generation pipeline to build the first large scale nursing MCQ dataset to train LLMs on a broad spectrum of nursing topics. We further introduce multiple nursing benchmarks to enable rigorous evaluation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that NurseLLM outperforms SoTA general-purpose and medical-specialized LLMs of comparable size on different benchmarks, underscoring the importance of a specialized LLM for the nursing domain. Finally, we explore the role of reasoning and multi-agent collaboration systems in nursing, highlighting their promise for future research and applications.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-industry.50
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou (China)
Editors:
Saloni Potdar, Lina Rojas-Barahona, Sebastien Montella
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
716–752
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-industry.50/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Md Tawkat Islam Khondaker, Julia Harrington, and Shady Shehata. 2025. NurseLLM: The First Specialized Language Model for Nursing. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 716–752, Suzhou (China). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NurseLLM: The First Specialized Language Model for Nursing (Khondaker et al., EMNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-industry.50.pdf