this was precisely the error! i simply loaded the dataset using load_dataset('path/to/dataset') , without any modification to the dataset. there were some invalid rows with their values and some null values in the dataset - pyarrow chose the default datatype to be integers. i made a temporary fix by making a column schema and setting the data type of all the columns to string. however this leads me to my second issue, loading in datasets with null values. even when i set the column type to all be string, null values aren’t read in and load_dataset yields an error . now i’m confused on how to read in datasets with null values using the load_datasets() function. 