  Work on social media rumour verification utilises signals from posts, their
propagation and users involved. Other lines of work target identifying and
fact-checking claims based on information from Wikipedia, or trustworthy news
articles without considering social media context. However works combining the
information from social media with external evidence from the wider web are
lacking. To facilitate research in this direction, we release a novel dataset,
PHEMEPlus, an extension of the PHEME benchmark, which contains social media
conversations as well as relevant external evidence for each rumour. We
demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating such evidence in improving
rumour verification models. Additionally, as part of the evidence collection,
we evaluate various ways of query formulation to identify the most effective
method.
