  This paper describes the participation of the QMUL-SDS team for Task 1 of the
CLEF 2020 CheckThat! shared task. The purpose of this task is to determine the
check-worthiness of tweets about COVID-19 to identify and prioritise tweets
that need fact-checking. The overarching aim is to further support ongoing
efforts to protect the public from fake news and help people find reliable
information. We describe and analyse the results of our submissions. We show
that a CNN using COVID-Twitter-BERT (CT-BERT) enhanced with numeric expressions
can effectively boost performance from baseline results. We also show results
of training data augmentation with rumours on other topics. Our best system
ranked fourth in the task with encouraging outcomes showing potential for
improved results in the future.
