diff --git a/src/common.rs b/src/common.rs
index 5023c94..ba820c3 100644
--- a/src/common.rs
+++ b/src/common.rs
@@ -112,20 +112,36 @@ pub fn load_tokenizer(tokenizer_files: TokenizerFiles, max_length: usize) -> Res
     if let serde_json::Value::Object(root_object) = special_tokens_map {
         for (_, value) in root_object.iter() {
             if value.is_string() {
-                tokenizer.add_special_tokens(&[AddedToken {
-                    content: value.as_str().unwrap().into(),
-                    special: true,
-                    ..Default::default()
-                }]);
+                if let Some(content) = value.as_str() {
+                    tokenizer.add_special_tokens(&[AddedToken {
+                        content: content.into(),
+                        special: true,
+                        ..Default::default()
+                    }]);
+                }
             } else if value.is_object() {
-                tokenizer.add_special_tokens(&[AddedToken {
-                    content: value["content"].as_str().unwrap().into(),
-                    special: true,
-                    single_word: value["single_word"].as_bool().unwrap(),
-                    lstrip: value["lstrip"].as_bool().unwrap(),
-                    rstrip: value["rstrip"].as_bool().unwrap(),
-                    normalized: value["normalized"].as_bool().unwrap(),
-                }]);
+                if let (
+                    Some(content),
+                    Some(single_word),
+                    Some(lstrip),
+                    Some(rstrip),
+                    Some(normalized),
+                ) = (
+                    value["content"].as_str(),
+                    value["single_word"].as_bool(),
+                    value["lstrip"].as_bool(),
+                    value["rstrip"].as_bool(),
+                    value["normalized"].as_bool(),
+                ) {
+                    tokenizer.add_special_tokens(&[AddedToken {
+                        content: content.into(),
+                        special: true,
+                        single_word,
+                        lstrip,
+                        rstrip,
+                        normalized,
+                    }]);
+                }
             }
         }
     }
diff --git a/src/pooling.rs b/src/pooling.rs
index cd0e6b3..9169f61 100644
--- a/src/pooling.rs
+++ b/src/pooling.rs
@@ -59,13 +59,13 @@ pub fn mean(
     let attention_mask = attention_mask_array
         .insert_axis(ndarray::Axis(2))
         .broadcast(token_embeddings.dim())
-        .unwrap_or_else(|| {
-            panic!(
+        .ok_or_else(|| {
+            anyhow::Error::msg(format!(
                 "Could not broadcast attention mask from {:?} to {:?}",
                 attention_mask_original_dim,
                 token_embeddings.dim()
-            )
-        })
+            ))
+        })?
         .mapv(|x| x as f32);
 
     let masked_tensor = &attention_mask * &token_embeddings;
diff --git a/src/sparse_text_embedding/impl.rs b/src/sparse_text_embedding/impl.rs
index f8c29db..189010b 100644
--- a/src/sparse_text_embedding/impl.rs
+++ b/src/sparse_text_embedding/impl.rs
@@ -119,7 +119,9 @@ impl SparseTextEmbedding {
             .map(|batch| {
                 // Encode the texts in the batch
                 let inputs = batch.iter().map(|text| text.as_ref()).collect();
-                let encodings = self.tokenizer.encode_batch(inputs, true).unwrap();
+                let encodings = self.tokenizer.encode_batch(inputs, true).map_err(|e| {
+                    anyhow::Error::msg(e.to_string()).context("Failed to encode the batch.")
+                })?;
 
                 // Extract the encoding length and batch size
                 let encoding_length = encodings[0].len();