Abstract It is desirable for dialog systems to have capability to express specific emotions during a conversation, which has a direct, quantifiable impact on improvement of their usability and user satisfaction. After a careful investigation of real-life conversation data, we found that there are at least two ways to express emotions with language. One is to describe emotional states by explicitly using strong emotional words; another is to increase the intensity of the emotional experiences by implicitly combining neutral words in distinct ways. We propose an emotional dialogue system (EmoDS) that can generate the meaningful responses with a coherent structure for a post, and meanwhile express the desired emotion explicitly or implicitly within a unified framework. Experimental results showed EmoDS performed better than the baselines in BLEU, diversity and the quality of emotional expression