If you notice, all the nouns which you cite as being used without the article (
collection, receipt, notification) are quite different from the others (
university, history). Those in the first group all express actions - in fact, a verb has been nominalised in all cases. You could easily rewrite the phrases with a verb construction:
After collecting CAI ... / We would like to inform you that we have received... / He has been notified of....
Some other examples which I've found include :
We expect payment of all outstanding invoices by.... / Rectification of this fault is achieved by.../ the current standard of care for treating HCV patients involves combination of an oral form of ribavirin with...
In all cases, grammatically the article could be included. So I would hypothesise that the explanation is : when a noun is in fact a nominalised action, followed by a prepositional phrase with "of", the article is optional and often omitted.
I can't find any mention of this in any grammars or reference sources though, so it
is only a hypothesis. But it seems to fit the data I've found so far. Can anybody think of any counter- examples?
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