NLytics at CheckThat! 2021: Check-worthiness estimation as a regression problem on transformers

The following system description presents our approach to the estimation of check-worthiness of text chunks. The given task has been framed as a regression problem. In order predict a numerical value for a chunk we opted for RoBERTa (A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach) as a neural network architecture for sequence classification. Starting off with a pre-trained model for language representation we fine-tuned this model on the given classification task with the provided annotated data in supervised training steps.