Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) have attracted significant interest from the machine-learning community due to their ability to elegantly and tractably model the delicate balance between quality and diversity of sets. We consider learning DPPs from data, a key task for DPPs; for this task, we introduce a novel optimization problem, Contrastive Estimation (CE), which encodes information about “negative” samples into the basic learning model. CE is grounded in the successful use of negative information in machine-vision and language modeling. Depending on the chosen negative distribution (which may be static or evolve during optimization), CE assumes two different forms, which we analyze theoretically and experimentally. We evaluate our new model on real-world datasets; on a challenging dataset, CE learning delivers a considerable improvement in predictive performance over a DPP learned without using contrastive information.