Why does Quanteda crash in R? - r

Question

I have an issue with the quanteda package in R. Whenever I try to load it, it shuts down R entirely.
Here the message:
Package version: 3.2.4
Unicode version: 14.0
ICU version: 70.1
*** caught segfault ***
address 0x245, cause 'invalid permissions'
Traceback:
1: RcppParallel::defaultNumThreads()
2: get_threads()
3: unname(min(get_threads(), na.rm = TRUE))
4: get_options_default()
5: quanteda_initialize()
6: quanteda_options(initialize = TRUE)
7: fun(libname, pkgname)
8: doTryCatch(return(expr), name, parentenv, handler)
9: tryCatchOne(expr, names, parentenv, handlers[[1L]])
10: tryCatchList(expr, classes, parentenv, handlers)
11: tryCatch(fun(libname, pkgname), error = identity)
12: runHook(".onAttach", ns, dirname(nspath), nsname)
13: attachNamespace(ns, pos = pos, deps, exclude, include.only)
14: doTryCatch(return(expr), name, parentenv, handler)
15: tryCatchOne(expr, names, parentenv, handlers[[1L]])
16: tryCatchList(expr, classes, parentenv, handlers)
17: tryCatch({ attr(package, "LibPath") <- which.lib.loc ns <- loadNamespace(package, lib.loc) env <- attachNamespace(ns, pos = pos, deps, exclude, include.only)}, error = function(e) { P <- if (!is.null(cc <- conditionCall(e))) paste(" in", deparse(cc)[1L]) else "" msg <- gettextf("package or namespace load failed for %s%s:\n %s", sQuote(package), P, conditionMessage(e)) if (logical.return && !quietly) message(paste("Error:", msg), domain = NA) else stop(msg, call. = FALSE, domain = NA)})
18: library(quanteda)
OS: Mac Ventura 13.1
R version: 4.2.2 (2022-10-31 "Innocent and Trusting"
Any ideas?

Answer 1

The error message you provided suggests that there is a segmentation fault when trying to load the quanteda package. A segmentation fault is a type of error that occurs when a program attempts to access memory that it is not allowed to access. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but one possible cause is a conflict with other packages or libraries that are loaded in your R session.
It is recommendable to check the versions of the package dependencies of quanteda and compare them with the versions that you have installed in your system, it is possible that one of them are not compatible.
You could try uninstalling and reinstalling quanteda package along with it's dependencies as well. You can use remove.packages("quanteda") to uninstall the package and install.packages("quanteda") to install it again.
Also, you could try to start a new R session and load only the packages you need and try loading the package again.
Another solution is to check your system resources, and make sure you have enough memory available. Segmentation faults can also occur when there is not enough memory to load a package.
Lastly, you could try updating your R version and see if that resolves the issue.