Tokenizer Fast bug: ValueError: TextInputSequence must be str

Environment info

• transformers version:
• Platform: In a Colab enviroment aswell as on my local windows version
• Python version: 3.7.4
• PyTorch version (GPU?): Yes and No
• Tensorflow version (GPU?): I didn’t try with tensorflow, but I suspect that it has nothing to do with it
• Using GPU in script?: I used the automodeling on a GPU session in Colab
• Using distributed or parallel set-up in script?: Nope

Who can help

@mfuntowicz

Information

Model I am using: Initially Electra but I tested it out with BERT, DistilBERT and RoBERTa

It’s using your scripts, but again, it believe it wouldn’t work if I did it myself. The model is trained on SQuAD.

Error traceback

"""
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/multiprocessing/pool.py", line 119, in worker
    result = (True, func(*args, **kwds))
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/multiprocessing/pool.py", line 44, in mapstar
    return list(map(*args))
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/transformers/data/processors/squad.py", line 165, in squad_convert_example_to_features
    return_token_type_ids=True,
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/transformers/tokenization_utils_base.py", line 2050, in encode_plus
    **kwargs,
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/transformers/tokenization_utils_fast.py", line 473, in _encode_plus
    **kwargs,
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/transformers/tokenization_utils_fast.py", line 376, in _batch_encode_plus
    is_pretokenized=is_split_into_words,
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tokenizers/implementations/base_tokenizer.py", line 212, in encode
    return self._tokenizer.encode(sequence, pair, is_pretokenized, add_special_tokens)
ValueError: TextInputSequence must be str
"""

To reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Download model and tokenizer (fast)
2. Test it out with the transformers pipeline for a question answering task

I’ve also made a small notebook to test it out for yourself. here

Expected behavior

Instead of giving an error, I would expect the tokenizer to work…

[LysandreJik]

Hi, thanks for opening such a detailed issue with a notebook!

Unfortunately, fast tokenizers don’t currently work with the QA pipeline. They will in the second pipeline version which is expected in a few weeks to a few months, but right now please use the slow tokenizers for the QA pipeline.

Thanks!

[ICSE-2023]

I also find this problem when using transformers. I check my data and find that if csv file contains much Null data or the length of str is 0, this error will be returned. I filter these data and I can successfully run my code.